


give us an our father

by deniigiq



Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Cults, Gen, Guilt, Kidnapping, M/M, Multi, Separations, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Torture, Violence, constant ribbing, hawkeye's unceasing chatter, losing a member and going on a warpath to find them essentially, matt's horror and exasperation, undesired team members, wade is a hero too damnit, wade's frayed nerves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-16 15:04:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17551928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Our Father.“Matt? Do you go by Matt?”Who art in Heaven.“I don’t like that. Someone said your middle name is Michael.”Hallowed be thy name.“I think I’m gonna call you Mike. Hi, Mike.”Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.“Hey, Mike, I heard you’ve been bad already. You only just got here, Mike. I can’t have you being like that so soon.”On earth, as it is in heaven.(Matt gets kidnapped right under Wade and Peter's noses. Peter's hurt, so Wade ends up with a slightly different team as he goes out to try to bring him home. They test him in every way possible.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HI hello. I wasn't going to post this until I had more progress done on it, but I cannot contain myself atm. Apologies for bombarding you all with fics lately. 
> 
> Please note: this piece is much darker compared to your typical DFV stuff, so it is sitting outside the verse for now. It starts dark, but then gets a little lighter (for now), I promise. 
> 
> References to panic attacks, torture, violence, child abuse, abuse-abuse, morally grey and morally black behavior, some dubious sexual behavior (no rape, but references to rape), and self-harm below. Please, please, please do what you need to keep yourselves safe.
> 
> EDIT: changed the summary to better reflect inside, my bad. Same fic tho

Red was gone, the kid was bleeding.

The kid was screaming, sobbing, bleeding. He needed help and Wade needed to give it to him because he didn’t know that any more stress on his organs could puncture them.

But fuck.

Red was gone.

He was really, truly gone.

We really fucked it up this time, didn’t we, my dear?

 

 

Spidey couldn’t understand what Wade was saying to him. He couldn’t understand the pain or the pressure or why Wade wasn’t helping him up. He couldn’t understand that Wade wasn’t going to pull the concrete and metal that was crushing him off.

No, all he could understand is that he was hurt—in literally crushing, literally searing pain—and his big middle brother was gone and Wade was standing around, refusing to give him so much as a fucking hug.

It had been years since Wade had felt like this. Felt like the rug had been torn out from under him. Felt like he was stumbling and drowning all at the same time.

Peter cried, all tears and snot and so much fucking blood—fuck, he was getting quieter, getting tired. He couldn’t get tired. He wouldn’t make it if he got tired—and all Wade could do was keep his head off the ground while Stark and the 911 crew raced to see who could get there first.

“Stay with me, baby boy,” he pleaded.

Peter’s breath hitched and he whimpered when he coughed and then whined when he found that he couldn’t do that.

“I know, honey, I know, it don’t feel good. Feels real shitty, but help’s on the way, stay with me. Help’s on the way.”

His first-aid training wasn’t gonna cut it and the fact was clogging his throat with an even more bitter taste than already was there from the blood.

“Wade,” Peter whimpered. He was raspy, barely making noise now, and Wade had to lean in close to hear him. He’d given up on not bleeding on the kid himself a few minutes ago. “Wade—Doub—Double—”

No. No, honey, no. He couldn’t deal with that. He couldn’t, not right now. He was so sorry, Red. So, so sorry.

“Wade—”

C’mon, kid, no. Just breathe, just focus on breathing.

“’M scared.”

Fuck.

 _Fuck_.

He sounded five years old. Heartbroken.

Wade was heartbroken too.

“We’re gonna get him back, Peter. I swear. I _swear_ to _God_. We will get him back. But you just—just breathe for me, okay? Don’t sleep, hey, HEY. Don’t sleep.”

He could hear sirens now, closing in. Minutes away. He had to keep this boy alive for mere minutes.

It felt like an eternity with Peter’s rasping. He wasn’t crying anymore. He was tired.

Jesus fucking Christ, Wade could not have this baby’s blood on his conscious.

He heard shouting and the metallic shutter and scratch of wings unfolding a few yards behind him. Heard the blast of arc reactor energy and the bark of military voice. And for once in his fucking life, he didn’t fucking care that it was the goddamn Avengers or whoever the fuck. He just needed a goddamned medical professional and some motherfucking orders before the silence in his head burst into light, into rings of fucking chaos.

Stark was at his side when he looked up, shouting at him, desperate to get his hands on the kid.

Wade couldn’t heard him over the noise in his ears. The screaming had started. And now that it had started, it would be _hours_ before it stopped and—someone get him the fuck away from this kid.

“—pool. Wade? WADE.”

Who the fuck are you? You wanna die?

“—omething wrong with him—”

“He’s having a fucking panic attack, you moron—WADE.”

“What, standing still?”

“You an expert on panic attacks, now? WADE. Someone get Barnes—WADE, LISTEN. Wade, c’mon man, I wanna help, I _need_ to help. I know you’re protecting him, I know you’re scared, but he’s gonna—”

This is Sam Wilson.

Sam Wilson is trustworthy.

Sam Wilson can have the boy.

“Thank you. Thank you. I’ve got him, he’s safe.”

He’s safe.

“Fuck.”

“JB, I got this, I need you to get Wilson. He’s dissociating. He won’t let anyone near Peter though and we need to move him _now._ ”

“Fuck. Okay. Fuck. Hey, Wilson. Fuck, what’s your trigger? Uh. Hi, Barnes here, let’s move a little bit to the—”

SAM WILSON CAN HAVE THE BOY ONLY

“Holy—woah, woah, woah! I ain’t touchin’ him, I ain’t touchin’ him. Look. There ya go. Sam, he’s fading in and out—”

SAM WILSON CAN HAVE THE BOY ONLY

“—nel Rhodes, he needs an order—”

“What the fuck you mean an order? He’s—”

“A fucking soldier Barnes, get your shit together, get Steve, or get Colonel Rhodes—”

SAM WILSON CAN HAVE THE BOY ONLY

“WILSON, STAND DOWN.”

Wilson, stand down.

“Holy shit, it worked.”

“Thank fuck, Rhodey, order him to move. They’ve got a gurney.”

“Wade, this is Colonel Rhodes. I want you to fall back, you hear me?”

Fall back. To where?

“Uh. Over there. Stand with JB.”

Stand with JB.

Stand with JB.

Stand with JB.

 

 

Wade snapped out of it and threw himself onto the floor of his bedroom. His bedroom? When—how—Peter.

“Peter?” he heard himself rasp. Everything was foggy, blurry around the edges. “Peter??”

“Hey, hey, easy man. You just slept off one hell of a tranq. You’re gonna feel pretty out of it.”

He knew this voice. It was in his house. It wasn’t allowed to be in his house, but that didn’t matter because—

“PETER.”

“Wade, calm down. Breathe, buddy, it’s me. It’s Sam. Hey, look at me, you know me.”

Sam Wilson can have the boy only.

Sam Wilson had had the boy.

His arm moved before he could think and he slammed Sam Wilson against the cabinets. Sam Wilson’s eyes went wide and then even again, even with safeties clicking of all around both of them.

“Wade, it’s okay,” he choked out through his pinned windpipe. “Peter’s okay. He’s alive.”

The boy’s—

The boy’s—

“He’s alive, Wade. I promise.”

“Dude, he’s like, glitching.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sam Wilson snapped to one of the people behind Wade. “He’s fine. Hey, Wade, you think you could let me down?”

Yes.

And with a thunk, he did.

Sam Wilson coughed hard and James Barnes put his body between him and Wade with his feet planted a shoulder’s width apart. Wade almost didn’t see him.

“Clint,” Sam Wilson gasped, “Drop it. He’s fine.”

Wade heard the safety of the last gun click back on as Hawkeye dropped it back down to waist height.

Peter was okay. He was alive.

But Red was—

He was gonna puke.

“Wade? Hey, listen, man, we got hella ques—oh shit. Okay, uh.”

Fuck. All these people were in his apartment and Red was gone. Red was gone.

Red.

Was.

Gone.

He puked again.

He didn’t have time for this. Someone needed to tell Nelson. Page. Castle. He needed Castle. Fuck.

“Hey, c’mon, man. Look at me, you’re not okay right now, Wade. You’ve been talking in your sleep. Can you tell me, pal, what’s your diagnosis? Are you in crisis right now? What does crisis feel like for you?”

Ha. Screaming. Wailing. The unrelenting smell of blood, the siren shriek of the Soldier Voice overlaid with the whispering of the Horrible Voice, both equally loud somehow.

He couldn’t deal with this. If he thought about it too much, he’d wish it into fucking being. He needed his pills. He needed a shower. He needed to see Peter. And then he needed find Red.

“Where’s the kid?” he gasped into the toilet bowl.

Wilson handed him a towel from the basket on the couch.

“He’s safe. At Stark’s place. Boy’s a miracle child, that’s for sure. Nearly punctured every damn organ. He’s bruised and needed a transfusion, but he’s stable now.”

Ah.

Good.

“He asleep?” he asked, wiping his mouth and flushing the toilet. He stood up and heard the rest of the boots at the doorway shuffle back. Good. Move, motherfuckers.

“Right now? Probably. Why?” Wilson asked.

Wade cranked on the cold water and scrubbed his hands before cupping them and dousing his face several times. He rinsed out his mouth and then rinsed his face and hands one more time. He inverted the towel Wilson had handed him and dried off.

“Some motherfuckers took Red,” Wade said. “And I’m gonna kill each and every last one of ‘em.”

There was a silence in the bathroom. Wade let it hang and stepped past the other three to go get his pills. He took the anti-psychs and the anti-anxiety ones this time. Both, ha. Just like the doctor ordered.

Not for her, though. He needed to focus.

“What do you mean, someone took Red?” Sam Wilson asked. Anxiety colored his tone. He knew Red now, too then. Wade figured one of these bozos would know him.  

“Not 100% sure yet,” he admitted, “Huge group of guys. Came in, interrupted the job, and wouldn’t go down. We weren’t prepared for that shit. If I’d have known all them fuckers were coming, I’d have brought a fuckin’ pipe bomb.”

Where the fuck was his suit? His boots?

Sam Wilson stepped out in front of him, chest out, jaw hard. Wade was surprised. Most folks didn’t have those kind of guts after getting choked out by Deadpool.

“How can we help? “ he asked, his two buddies reeled back in shock at the sudden offer of their services.

Wade wasn’t surprised. This was Sam Wilson they were talking about. This was a guy who’d tried to counsel him through the door on Christmas Day last year. He was good, solid. Through and through.

He was no good for what Wade had to do.

“You can keep the kid asleep,” he said. “And you can let me do what I’m good at.”

“Someone needs to tell Nelson,” Sam said.

“Alright, so tell Nelson,” Wade said. He didn’t need to tell Nelson. He intended to have their boy back by Monday. He went to go get dressed, but Sam jumped in front of him again.

“Wade, don’t be stupid about this,” he said, “Do you even know who did it? Or you know, why they did it?”

Not important questions.

“WADE.”

Fuck you.

“Fuck _you_ , man. You know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna walk into wherever, guns blazing, and whoever these fuckers are are gonna shoot Red on sight. He don’t heal like you and Peter, Wade. He’ll die, if he’s not already dead. Is that what you want? You think you can save him from that?” Sam snarled.

“Well, that was the fuckin’ plan, yeah,” Wade growled back.

“If that’s your plan, then I ain’t letting you do this. I _like_ Red. And I care about bringin’ him or whatever’s left of him home in one piece.”

Bold to assume that Wade wasn’t going to do the same damn thing.

“Fuck off, Wilson,” he sneered. “This ain’t your battle to win. Me and the kid lost Red. He’s our guy. It’s our job to get him back. Kid’s hurt, so it’s _my_ job to get him back.”

“What, and you think you can do that on your own?”

He had to take a second to breathe so he didn’t turn around and kill Wilson where he stood. He breathed in deep and let it out slowly. Two times. Three times.

“Listen, Sam,” he managed to say when his heart stopped threating to bust a leak from his neck, “I know I seem like a fuck-up, but I know what I’m doing. This is my day job. And it ain’t pretty and none of y’all like to think about it, but there is the _slightest chance_ that I do what I do because I’m really fucking good at it. Imma get Red back. Just keep an eye on the kid for me. If you want to help, that’s what you can do.”

Sam’s chest was heaving a little bit with his frustration. Barnes’s eyes were cold steel gray, flickering between him and Wade like he couldn’t decide who he needed to shove back. Hawkeye holstered his gun.

“Alright, look,” he said, “We all like Red. And we all want him to come home from this alive, so why don’t we do this? Sam, let the big guy do his thing. If it don’t work, then we’ll figure out something else. Maybe one or two of us can—”

“I got another team, shithead,” Wade interrupted. “And if I need help, I’ll be getting it from them. Not you. Now get the fuck out of my house, all of you. Now.”

Silence.

“I said now,” Wade growled.

More silence. Hawkeye sighed and dropped his chin. He started walking and grabbed Barnes’s arm.

“Let’s go,” he said. Barnes hesitated and then shook off the arm to reach for Sam. He jerked out of Barnes’s grip before he even made contact and took a step closer to Wade.

“If you fuck up, you call us,” he barked. “If you fuck up, you call _me._ Foggy is my fucking friend, Wilson. I’m not doing this to him.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get fucked,” Wade said.

Sam was hot. Barnes corralled him and tried to put an arm over his shoulders to get him out, but he shook it off in fury and stormed out. Wade closed the door behind them.

Took a breath.

Let it out.

This was it.

Go time.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All Caps = Wade's internal soldier voice. These are discussed in greater detail in "not all roses" in my Dumpster Fires Verse. See that fic for more on his voices.


	2. Chapter 2

He scoured the scene. Went through every nook and cranny. Dug through rubble until he couldn’t anymore.

He went back to try to find the bodies of the people he’d dropped that night. The ones he’d shoot without thinking. The two he’d ended to get to Peter.

There wasn’t so much as a drop of blood left.

It was infuriating. He broke a hand in frustration against one of the huge pieces of concrete left behind. Not the one that had fallen on the kid, although thinking about it, he wanted to go break it again on that one.

He had to regroup.

He had to breathe.

Look at the facts, Wade. What have you got in front of you? What do you need to do first?

Fact One. These people who had taken Red were pros. This wasn’t some two-bit, evil villain shit. This was a calculated movement. This had been in the works for a while.

Fact Two. They hadn’t taken Red to kill him. What little Wade could remember of Red before he’d vanished was him fighting a bunch of hands trying to cover his face. Arms trying to get around his neck. No weapons. No guns, no knives. Folks were using bodies. They didn’t want him dead. What the fuck did they want him for?

No, don’t think about that yet. Facts first, questions later.

Fact Three. These people were isolating Red. They wanted him away from Wade and Peter. And if they wanted him away from Wade and Peter, then they wanted him away from Nelson and Page.

Fact Four. There was no fact four. Wade had no more facts.

Fuck.

He didn’t have enough to jump to the questions. He just—

He needed more intel.

 

 

He caught up with Nelson too soon. Wilson and Co. were still there with him. They were trying to break the news lightly, but Nelson obviously knew what all them coded words meant and was devastated.

He looked up to Wade and saw him in the suit and Wade knew from his eyes that he knew what Wade was there for.

See, Wilson and these guys had rapport with Nelson. They were his clients, but Wade? Wade was pretty sure that they were friends. Red came to Wade. He confided in Wade, he cried with Wade and hid away with Wade sometimes. And Wade, to a lesser extent, reciprocated. He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t even realized when it had started. But it was done now. Red was one of his people. Nelson knew this. Wade was on the shortlist of numbers he called when Red was out too late for comfort.

Nelson stepped away from the other guys towards him.

“What do you need?” he asked, his voice thick with tears and hurt.

Nelson was one of theirs, boys. He was on the vigilante side. Always had been. Always would be.

“Everything.”

 

 

Red had a fuckload of secrets. He kept them close to his heart, practically staple-gunned them there, facing in where no one else could see them.

Wade knew some stuff. Like Red’s fucking shitty foster homes story. His shitty orphanage tale. His war with Wilson Fisk (god, so many fucking Wilsons in this kid’s life) and most recently, his horrific evil twin sister.

He didn’t know much about the sensei. Didn’t know about the Hand. Chaste. Red had told him about his mom, but he hadn’t told him that that shit had happened right under her nose. In the basement of a church.

The perfect place to raise a warrior.

The perfect tomb to abandon a fucking child in.

Red had been screaming at that stained glass for longer than anyone gave him credit for. Honestly, it was a fucking miracle that he was half as sane as he was—fuck that. That he was even able to get up the goddamn morning.

Wade hadn’t felt this angry in a long time. The other Wilson had gone dead silent. His compadres, too.

“What does the Hand look like?” he asked.

“Fucking ninjas,” Nelson said. His face didn’t quiver anymore, he was past furious.

“All in black, then?”

“Red.”

“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?”

Nelson was not.

“Alright, they ever try to take him before?” he asked.

Nelson shook his head.

“They don’t try to take him anywhere. They want him dead where he stands.”

“How do I find them?”

Nelson sighed and held his head in his hands.

“I don’t know. Matty tries to avoid them.” He froze. Then snapped up to perfect posture. “Elektra doesn’t, though,” he said. “She, okay, so it’s complicated, but she knows where they are.”

“Who the hell is Elektra?” Hawkeye asked.

“Red’s sister,” Wade said to the side, “You know where she is?”

“Fuck, there’s two of them?” Barton whined.

“I don’t, but Castle does.”

“Hey, hold up,” Barnes interrupted. “As someone with an uncomfortable amount of similar life experience here, if there’s two Reds and one of these groups want him, then you can be damn sure they want the other one too.”

A silence. Because the man was 100% correct.

Nelson cleared his throat.

“Yeah, no. Not if this is the Hand.”

Well, that sounded bad.

They all turned his way again.

“Elektra very, very briefly ran The Hand,” Nelson said uncomfortably, “And then tried to take the whole organization down single-handedly. They don’t want her back. She is the last person they want to see.”

Another silence.

Hey, Red? Your life is a fucking nightmare.

“So we find Castle,” Hawkeye said to break the silence, “Then we find Scary Lady No. 1. Then we find Red?”

“Wait a fuckin’ second here,” Wade drawled, “There’s no fuckin’ ‘we’ anything. _I’m_ finding Castle, then Scary Lady No. 1, then Red.”

He did not deserve those looks. Those looks were for stupid people and Wade was not stupid.

“Wade,” Sam said patiently, “We are all working towards the same goal here.”

With key artistic differences, but yes.

“So we should work together. Obviously Red trusts you the most, but it sounds like this is more than a one-man job. And if the three of you guys couldn’t keep them from taking Red, then what’s to say that you, on your own, can?”

Well, first off, Sam Wilson was rude. The Rudest. The Rudest human ever to rude.

Wade was fine. Wade was going to be fine. Wade was going to take a little hit of coke when he got to where he needed to be and then Wade was going to go full Deadpool on these motherfuckers.

“Wade, work with them,” Nelson pleaded. “Peter’s going to wake up at some point and he’s going to have a meltdown if he thinks you’re out there alone. And then we all know he’ll chase after you and you can’t protect both of them right now.”

Ohohoho.

Ho.

Fuck.

Fucking Nelson and his goddamn fancy schmancy law degree.

“Fine,” he sniffed. Barton dropped his bow in shock. Nelson closed his eyes in gratitude. “But I’m fuckin’ lead on this mission to hell, y’all hear me?”

 

 

Castle lived under a rock, but Nelson was thankfully connected to Page who was thankfully fucking Castle in all her spare time.

She denied it. Wade stared at her until she dug out her phone and didn’t even have to scroll through any contacts because Wade was right and he was the first one. She glared at him while the phone rang.

 

 

Castle stared at them all like Bella on a bad catnip trip once he’d gotten the full story.

“Let me get my shit,” he said.

Wait.

No, no. Wade already had three people too many on this rag-tag team of his, he didn’t need another gunmen. He had two snipers and a bird. He literally had more stones than birds.

Castle threw a guitar case over his shoulder and locked the door behind him. Barnes was fascinated with him, probably making plans to abandon Cap for someone who had the creative genius to fill his guitar case with foam and broken down bits of lethal weapon.

“Dude, he’s mega straight,” Wade heard Barton hiss over Barnes’s shoulder on the subway. People were taking pictures of them all. They probably looked like the line-up of rogues from Rapunzel. Everyone with a slightly different poorly concealed weapon.

Red.

 This was how much he was willing to sacrifice for you, Red.

All for your safety, Red.

Two teeny pink children wearing stripes and matching tulle skirts pointed at him from their corner of the subway car. He looked around and realized it wasn’t the blades sticking out of his back.

It was the Hello Kitty backpack.

Lord, make this train swift.

 

 

It wasn’t. It got stuck with two stops to go and appeared resolved to stay that way until Castle said, not to worry, he had this.

Everyone on the train, including the civilians watched on in interest.

He jogged out onto the platform, stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew an ear-drum shattering whistle that got the couple officers standing by the gates’ attention. They dropped their sandwiches and threw themselves at the gates.

Castle shouted back that he’d meet them at their station, threw himself between the officers on the barriers, and gunned it up the stairs.

The cops fell over themselves chasing after, barking into their radios, demanding support at their station and that all trains exit the station immediately. Only trains out. No trains in.

The subway doors closed.

Barnes whimpered and clutched at Barton’s shoulder.

“Man, do not do this to yourself,” Barton told him.

 

 

Wade had never in his life been happier to get the fuck above ground. He tried to put some distance between himself and the bozos but crashed right into Castle and his brand new yellow beanie.

Castle was in a much better mood from the adrenaline.

He led them all to a towering, brutalist apartment building and started up the stairs.

Wade realized two things after they passed the fifth floor and the tenth flight of stairs. Firstly, the place was a shithole. And secondly, there was no elevator.

 

 

Elektra Natchios was, and Wade could not emphasize this enough, smoking hot. Insulting attractive. Unnaturally beautiful.

She definitely tried to maim them as soon as the door opened, but honestly? It only made her hotter.

Barnes had to take a second to put his hands on his knees and breathe. Sam Wilson watched him with _supreme_ judgement and reminded him, very loudly, that they’d been together for months.

Elektra had gone through probably a quarter of the weapons she stored on her body when Castle finally said the magic words.

“They took Matthew.”

Wade thought it was fucking weird to hear someone say Red’s full name but the dead silence it got made it worth it.

“Who,” Elektra asked without asking.

“Not sure, thinking the Hand,” Castle said.

Her whole expression went slack and she stabbed whatever she had in her hand into the doorframe then stepped aside.

“Come in.”

 

 

So Elektra was one of those people who had fuck all in her apartment. And that was fine. 100% the sign of a psychopath, but fine.

“It’s a safehouse,” she said without prompting after she closed the door behind them all. She wrenched the blade out of the doorframe and turned to them all with murder in her eyes.

Wade had the uncomfortable realization that Red was the nice twin. He saw the moment when Sam Wilson realized it too. His eye twitched a little.

“Tell me,” Elektra said, smoky like black tea, to Castle. Castle deferred to Wade. Wade then had to recount his failure as an assassin and a human being to this insanely gorgeous person. Doing so reminded him a little bit of talking to Vanessa.

Aw.

That hurt.

“You’re Deadpool and you managed to lose my Matthew,” Elektra said slowly.

Yep. Yes, ma’am he had. Not proud of it.

Elektra gave him a once-over with her cat eyes. Then she rounded on the others.

“And who is your company?” she asked.

Wade lolled his head at them and considered disowning them. Barton waved.

“Hawkeye,” he said. The others followed suit. Elektra stared at Barnes thoughtfully after he introduced himself as the Winter Soldier.

“You’re cute,” she noted.

“He’s taken,” Sam announced.

She smirked.

“That’s what they all say.” She threw her hair over her shoulder and left them all standing around like chumps in her empty-ass living room. The sound of multiple metal weapons hitting the floor met them from the other room. Then the door closed. Wade turned to Castle.

“Is this going well?” he asked, “Because I’m getting kind of mixed messages here.”

Castle glanced from him to the door Elektra had closed.

“I think she likes you,” he lied.

 

 

As a fellow assassin, Wade could get behind Elektra’s idea of coming out to play. She threw on a black and red little number and then crammed as many sharp and pointies as she could in all the crannies, threw on a hoodie and a backpack and some e-fucking-normous sunglasses and said, “cool, let’s go.”

She sashayed out the door like nothing had ever bothered her in her life and then took them all down a maze of staircases and alleys and then more staircases until even Castle started to get a little uncomfortable. Barton got progressively more enthused the deeper they went. Barnes, not so much. Wilson offered to hold his hand multiple times, only to refuse it when he actually went to take him up on the offer.

Wade hadn’t seen this place. He’d seen a lot of the city’s underbelly, but not this part.

It was kind of nasty, half-river, half tunnel. Mold and algae growing along the walls and the edges of the water. It must have been sitting for years. Its edges bled from green into red before it sunk down deep in the middle to an ominous black.

Elektra kept walking.

“Hey, so, rumor has it that you were kinda the boss of this whole operation for a minute,” Barton piped up from the back. Elektra scoffed.

“They brought me back from the dead to be their Black Sky. Didn’t think of the consequences.”

Barton shut up. Wade suddenly understood why Red was never impressed with him.

“What’s a Black Sky?” he prodded. It sounded mystic.

Elektra hummed. Didn’t answer.

Even more cryptic, nice.

They stepped into a stairwell that hadn’t seen light in years. Water leaked down into it from a run-off pipe that had split long enough ago that it had rusted over. The bend in the stairs led straight into blackness.

To be fair, if Wade was running a secret ninja cult and needed a place to hide it, this place was bang-on in terms of aesthetic. 10 out of 10 for mysterious and creepy. 2 out of 10 for hygiene. 4 out of 10 for fire hazard.

“The Hand are a load of egotistical bureaucrats,” Elektra finally revealed. “They like to pretend that they get their hands dirty, but rarely do they actually join the rest of their people.”

“But you do?” Wade asked hopefully.

Elektra laughed loud and the sound echoed off the sides of the passage they’d stepped into at the bottom of the stairs. There was water half an inch high sitting on the floor. It looked like someone had ripped a few trash bags open and sprinkled their contents around the area to liven the place up a little.

Elektra stopped at the end of the passage and flattened herself against the wall. She drew her blades and pulled her scarf up over her nose. Wade unholstered a gun and heard Castle shrug off his case.

“Hey, hey, wait!” Wilson hissed. Wade and Elektra exchanged a glance and then gave him their attention. “What the hell are you doing? We can’t go in there without some kind of plan.”

Oh, right. A plan.

“Kill everyone you can get your hands on,” Elektra decided.

Good plan, let’s go.

Castle flicked open his case.

“No!”

God, c’mon Wilson. This isn’t rocket science.

“We—what are we even looking for?”

Elektra stared at him without blinking.

“Matthew.”

Duh. Pay attention.

“And what if he’s not there?” Wilson pressed.

He did have a point. Wade deferred to the expert. Elektra cocked an eyebrow and a hip.

“Then we find someone who knows where he is.”

“And do what with them?”

Silence. Castle sheepishly clicked his last piece into place.

“Guys, no. We are not torturing people. Violence begets violence.”

Barton and Barnes looked at each other, a little embarrassed for their buddy. Wade sighed and decided he’d take this one.

“Sam,” he said, “We all get that you’re like, the next Captain America rah-rah, good for you. But. I want you to look around at all the fuckheads here and reflect on what you’ve just said.”

Sam did. He leveled a stern look at all of them.

“We are _not_ torturing anyone,” he maintained.

“Fine, I’ll torture them,” Elektra said magnanimously. “They brought me back from the dead and used me without my fucking permission. I’ve got the moral high ground here.”

Even Sam couldn’t argue with that.

“Everyone, on my mark,” Elektra directed.

 

 

The room they all spun into was a mess hall of sorts, with people kind of milling around, nursing injuries and whispering.

They were not welcome.

Elektra, in particular, was not welcome. People wrapped up all in red took one look at her and produced some of the wildest medieval-esque weapons Wade had seen in a long time.

Elektra was a stunning martial artist, however, and really Wade should have expected that, given her blood brother. He could totally see now, in her leaps and swings, that she’d been trained specifically to fit with Red. Or maybe it was the other way around? He wasn’t sure if they’d been selected as a pair or if things had just happened that way.

They were both equally horrible.

Castle got ahold of a guy who, after some persuading (and some protesting from Wilson which was rapidly silenced) was willing to talk. He swore that they didn’t know anything about Red’s whereabouts.

Elektra widened her grin and gave him a shake and he just about pissed himself. Castle looked on in approval. Barton winced in sympathy. Barnes was busy poking his nose into places it didn’t belong.

“We haven’t been ordered to find him in weeks,” the poor sap pinned by Elektra’s smile said, “H-he’s not even on our radar.”

“You think this is a game?” Elektra bubbled.

The guy whimpered.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“What _do_ you know?”

He didn’t think he knew anything. Elektra lolled her head to Wade.

He agreed.

Two fingers into a non-negotiable hand massage and the guy suddenly remembered something.

“There’s a rumor,” he shrieked. Wade paused in his finger manipulations. Breakings. Well, no, manipulations sounded kinder.

“Go on,” he said. Wilson had covered his ears and pressed his face into the newly-returned Barnes’s shoulder to block out the screaming.

“Y-Your-your teacher,” the guy stammered.

Teacher? Wade hadn’t had a teacher in years. Well, that wasn’t true. Peter taught him shit every day. He was a wealth of information about memes and fluid mechanics and animal facts that Wade never even knew he didn’t need to know.

He only realized when the guy started shrieking and didn’t stop that he wasn’t talking to him.

“Leave,” Elektra commanded.

Leave what?

She snarled at him.

Oh, okay.

“Alright, guys pack it in, we’re done,” he announced. Barton and Wilson were both ready to go. Castle evidently knew something Wade didn’t and broke down the gun in record time. By the time they’d all scurried back down the nasty hallway and up the nasty stairs, the screaming was just about at a bearable decibel.

They couldn’t hear it anymore once they hit the mouth of the first tunnel.

“So that was fucking horrible,” Barton announced.

 

 

Elektra reappeared after some time, no longer half as cute and cuddly as before.

She was livid. She was a walking terror. No one dared speak to her. They just had to wait until she cooled off. In the meantime, they let her lead them back through the maze to her safehouse in dead silence. It was only when they got back there and the door had been shut that she finally spoke. She excused herself to go change out of her clothes.

The bedroom door closed.

A scream reverberated through the hallway and the sound of glass shattering joined it.

Barnes winced. Barton bared his teeth nervously. A chill ran down Wade’s spine.

The first thought in his head was ‘banshee’ followed by ‘siren’ followed by a sinking feeling as he realized that if Elektra wasn’t happy, that meant that Red was in a very tricky situation. The kind that she didn’t think could be solved through a few blades or bullets.

That spelled trouble.

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

He should have known better. Things had been going too well for too long.

His knuckles hurt. His feet burned with the cold. He could feel a scab forming on his lip and he shivered hard enough that his shoulder juddered against the wall.

It was stupid.

Everything. Him. Them. Everyone. Everything.

The last two fingers on his left hand were numb. They’d been throbbing earlier, blown up with fluid. They were broken. Matt had had to tie them together with a bit of his shirt, but that hadn’t lasted long because those motherfuckers had come back and doused him with water—freezing water, rain water, not pipe water. Too metallic for that. Rain water, in this day and fucking age.

They’d taken the shirt and the shoes and everything else, like he was some kind of rag doll. Threw him down on the floor hard enough to crack his head. Purposefully of course, and things had gone pretty hazy after that. He woke up with no shoes.

No wrap around his fingers.

No glasses, no shirt.

A robe. Short, with cut-off pants of the same material. Probably the same color.

“Hi, friend.”

A voice stepping closer to him. Bare feet on wet concrete.

“How you doing there, buddy?”

Come closer and find out yourself.

“Hey, easy there. I just wanna help. You gonna bite me like you bit Niko?”

Abso-fucking-lutely. C’mere.

“I’m not gonna help you if you’re gonna be bitey, man.” A pause. “Hey, come on. This ain’t right, they got you all strung out like this. Here, let me help.”

No.

No, no, no. Nice try. Matt wasn’t going to play this good-cop bad-cop game.

The hands came closer anyways, Matt could practically feel the heat radiating off of them. Could smell their palms. Heat. Plastic. Faux leather. Where you been drivin’, champ?

“That’s it, that’s a good man. Easy, easy.”

He’d pressed himself into the wall, tucked his chin, hunched his shoulders. He didn’t have the glasses, and that worked to his benefit. He flickered his eyes around where the body actually was and pushed out his jaw.

“Hey, it’s okay,” the voice crooned. “No need to be scared. It’s okay, I’m here to help.”

Yeah, he knew. Intimately. So come here.

He felt the person drop into a slow squat about two feet away from him. His breath was warm. He’d eaten some kind of protein bar recently. The preservatives ran iron-y past Matt’s nose. Matt made a calculated barely-there noise and pressed himself back further.

The person in front of him was _highly_ attracted to him. His heart throbbed and his body heat blossomed, billowed out around Matt’s frame of awareness. It wasn’t sexual. Not yet. It was something else, something worse.

“You’re beautiful,” the person said with more breath than voice. The heat from the words trailed over Matt’s face in a cloud. He dropped his bottom lip a little bit and kept his chin tucked. Flickered his eyes around somewhere above the person’s shoulder.

The person’s heartbeat throbbed steady, and he slowly lifted a hand, held it out like Matt was some kind of animal. As though he needed to smell it before he decided if this guy was safe. He let it happen, though. Let the fingers edge closer and closer, didn’t respond to them until they were right next to his chin, then his tucked jaw.

“Good boy,” the voice crooned. “That’s a good boy.”

Oho. So you’re one of _them._

He lifted his head out of his shoulder and tilted it at the person, then held his eyes still, as though focused on the person’s eyes. Transfixed. Then he flicked them hesitantly to the side, in the direction of the hand and carefully, carefully tipped his cheek into the waiting palm.

The guy sucked in a breath. His palm was warm.

He was aroused now.

Ha.

The screaming was deafened by the blow and the guy swore after he’d torn away, ripping his hand back and forth through the air as though shaking it would lessen the pain.

Nah, buddy, see, two can play at that game.

Matt licked his bloody lip.

“You fucking whore,” the guy spat.

“Fuck with me,” he snarled back.

“You—”

“FUCK WITH ME.”

Yeah, pal. Get that bunny rabbit heart of yours hammering. Get the fuck outta here. You ain’t shit. You. Ain’t. Shit.

The door to wherever they were keeping him shrieked shut over his new best friend’s furious muttering. He had a whole lot of things he wanted to do to Matt. They weren’t what Matt would call tame.

That was fine, he wasn’t here to play, either.

The door crashed closed and Matt was left alone in what he could only presume was the dark. He could hear water somewhere, trickling into something plastic. Probably the buckets which had doused him earlier.

 

 

It had been hours now, since the door had last shrieked.

He was freezing. The sound of the water was ceaseless. He heard footsteps all around, voices talking about the new weapon. Him. He was the weapon. He didn’t need to kid himself, didn’t need to hope for anything else. He’d always been a weapon, it had just been a matter of time before someone took up Stick’s abandoned post and wielded him.

It had all been a long time coming.

 

 

He lost track of time. His head injury made focusing difficult, made meditating difficult. He fell asleep without meaning to, which was a disgusting rookie mistake. He had to keep his guard up at all times now to make up for it.

The water grated on his nerves. There was a new shift of voices wandering around. Still whispering about the new weapon. They were nervous. Antsy. Scared.

As they should have been.

He caught a set of footsteps and followed them in his head. They were headed his way, they had friends. They stepped in something wet around a hundred yards away from the entrance to Matt’s ice box.

It was someone of rank. All the other footsteps stopped for a moment when they encountered these. Paused for long enough for a salute of some type, then hurried off in another direction.

Whoever it was, they were Matt’s new handler. And they were going to try to break him down to build him back up so that he fit their grip.

The next couple hours were going to be rough. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against his knees. Picked through all of the things which might help him get through it. The first thought was Foggy, but that hurt too much. Hurt his teeth, hurt his throat, hurt his lungs. He couldn’t afford to think of Foggy right now, not when Fogs had probably just received the news of his capture. Or disappearance. Whatever they were calling it.

Or maybe he hadn’t yet. Maybe he was still at the office, huffing between paragraphs of a brief. Bracing a hand against his forehead to keep his hair from falling in his eyes as he read.

No. It hurt too much to think of Foggy’s stuttered breathing and soft gasps as he started to cry at the news.

Matt couldn’t think of that. Not now. Not when this person was going to beat him until he sobbed.

Nah. He thought of the drop of a staff on his shoulder. His neck, his back. The feeling of falling to his knees, over and over, until he ripped out the thread in his jeans. Until breathing fucking hurt and that was the new normal. Until his knuckles had bled so much, the target was slippery, and that was the new normal.

He dug deep into that void. Into that pain.

Brought it back to the surface.

Forced himself to remember the feeling of kneeling in church, painted up and down in colors he couldn’t see under a too-big cotton t-shirt and screaming in wracking sobs for his daddy to come back. To take him home. To end this pain.

That was what he had to hold onto.

Because the next day had been acceptance. And the pain had somehow hurt less after that.

The door swung open again. He opened his eyes and twisted his face towards it.

“Matthew, right?” said a light baritone.

Here we go, Lord:

Our Father.

“Matt? Do you go by Matt?”

Who art in Heaven.

“I don’t like that. Someone said your middle name is Michael.”

Hallowed be thy name.

“I think I’m gonna call you Mike. Hi, Mike.”

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

“Hey, Mike, I heard you’ve been bad already. You only just got here, Mike. I can’t have you being like that so soon.”

On earth, as it is in heaven.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Wade and the others had to leave Elektra for a while because she was not capable of doing anything but throwing shit and gasping.

“So this is bad,” Hawkeye noted as they all rode the fucking subway back south.

Castle was staring off into space and Wade desperately want to join him wherever he was.

This was more than bad. If Red’s demon sibling could not articulate the reason for her fury and still could not do so after two hours to cool off, the possibility of Red’s fantastic homecoming was severely compromised. And now, having seen Elektra in action and having come to terms with the fact that Red was the softer, more gentle of the two of them, Wade’s stomach was cramping even worse.

Sam Wilson appeared to understand. He watched Wade with pursed lips, but kindly didn’t say anything this time.

“Guy said something about a teacher,” Hawkeye carried on, both hands wrapped around two hanging hand straps. “We know who that is?”

Barnes checked back in to give him a flat look.

“Gal’s teacher,” he said simply.

“Yeah, no, I got that,” Hawkeye grumbled, “I mean do we got a name or a location or a fuckin’ code, I dunno, something like that?”

“Stick,” Castle said.

“Gesundheit,” Hawkeye said.

Castle brought his chin down and twisted his head dangerously in the guy’s direction. He did not care that there were four children on this train, he was fully prepared to beat the stupid out of him if this shit continued.

“Stick,” he said very purposefully again.

The train rattled on as they all absorbed this and the silent threat of maiming behind it.

“Okay, so let’s say that, hypothetically, some of us don’t know what the fuck that means—” Wade started.

“His name is fucking Stick.”

What.

Who the fuck names their kid—

“It’s not his real name.”

“You know him?” Barnes asked as the train jostled hard and they all jostled with it. Castle sighed and dropped his head forward, as much as the arm he’d braced against the top handrail of the train would allow.

“No. Got wasted with the two of them once, is all. They started making fun of him. Doing impressions, that kind of thing,” he explained.

Wade desperately wanted to see Red loosen up enough to do an impression of anyone. The thought made him swallow, though, because the longer they were on this damn train and not on Red’s tail, the less likely that was becoming.

“He friendly, according to them?” he asked. Castle shook his head.

“They laughed for ten minutes over being made to kneel on rice for hours at a time,” he said.

The train’s chugging filled the silence again.

“ _When_ we find him,” Sam Wilson said emphatically, “We are putting that boy in therapy, whether he likes it or not.”

You know what, Wilson? Hear, hear.

 

 

They went back to Nelson to inform him of the bad luck and to verify that this Stick person was who they were now after.

Wade felt fucking awful doing this because he knew that every time they spoke or contacted him, Nelson built up a little knoll of hope in his chest and they mowed it down like the artillery at Flanders’s field. He breathed shakily and told them all he knew about Stick.

It wasn’t much.

“I only met him once,” he said, And only in passing. He showed up out of the blue, threw Matt into his coffee table, smashed it to bits. They, well. I guess they talked. He doesn’t—didn’t—want Matt to have friends or, to be perfectly honest, a house or a job or anything really. But he,” Nelson trailed off and swallowed.

Castle had his arms firmly crossed and wouldn’t make eye contact either. Wilson noticed the pattern and leaned forward in his seat with his elbows on his knees.

“He what, Foggy?” he asked softly.

“He’s dead,” Nelson said, shaking his head. “He died. It doesn’t make sense why they would say that. He’s been—it’s been almost a year since—”

Hold up.

No, no, no. See, Wade was the one over here with the immortality deal going on. Him and apparently Elektra, although her for one night only.

“How did he die?” Barnes asked because his life didn’t leave room for things like shock or fear of the unknown anymore.

“Elektra killed him.”

 

 

“This is fucking crazy people shit,” Hawkeye bitched as they trooped out after Nelson to go talk to someone who knew a little bit more about this dead asshole than he did. “This is fucking murder incest or something, you know that?”

“Barton, you ever hear yourself talk?” Castle demanded. “Like, do you hear the words that come out of your mouth, or do you just let loose and pray?”

“Hey, I have a novel idea: why don’t we all shut the fuck up because we’re about to enter a church?” Barnes snapped at all of them.

Wow.

Well. _Someone_ was Catholic.

“I’m not Catholic.”

 _Someone_ was Catholic-adjacent.

“This gag rule includes you, Wilson.”

Aye, aye, Sergeant.

 

 

Nelson told them to wait in the foyer of Red’s church. He stepped into the main room to fetch whoever it was and left the rest of them standing around, trying to look as least homicidal as possible. Castle crossed himself and bowed his head for a second. Barnes wedged his arms around his ribs as tight as they would go.

Barton was busy gawping up at the stained glass windows fitted into the walls, pulling at Sam Wilson’s sleeve and asking how people made stained glass. Wilson, obviously, had no answers for him and told him to keep his voice down or turn his hearing aids up.

He popped one out and cranked up the volume.

Well. In some weird way, Wade felt like that explained a lot.

Nelson emerged with the itty bitty woman who Red had introduced Wade and Peter and friends to the Halloween last. He couldn’t remember her name. Sister…Peggy? Sister Ellie?

She was white as a sheet, evidently having been informed by Nelson of the present situation. She wasn’t, however, scared of their combined hulking mass, and Wade gave her mad props for it.

“Come with me,” she said and turned around to take them into the belly of the church.

 

 

She held onto the edges of the sink in the laundry room they stood in as though she was going to be sick. Nelson rubbed a hand comfortingly across her back. He met Wade eye’s with almost steel eyes of his own.

“Sister Maggie knows more about Stick,” he explained. “She saw him coming in and out of here when Matt was a kid.”

The Sister seemed to swallow back bile at the thought. Castle winced in sympathy and Sam rubbed a hand over his heart to soothe the ache he evidently felt there. Barnes stepped forward and took the first shot for them.

“Sister,” he said, oddly reverently, “We just want to help Red, if there is _anything_ you know which you think might lead us to this other guy or to who he was working for at the time Red was in your care, it would be an immense—”

The Sister did vomit this time and everyone recoiled before they could contain themselves. She really wasn’t coping with this well. Almost like she had a lot of—

Holy fuck, how the fuck had Wade forgotten?

They should never have asked her. Never. Ever, ever, ever. This was—Red wouldn’t want her to go through this, whether his life was in the balance or no. This was just too far for everyone.

“Actually, I think we’re done here,” he said. The others startled in confusion. Nelson rubbed the Sister’s back and murmured to her. She shook her head, then planted a hand on the wall under her forehead and the other on her hip. She forced herself to breathe and Wade was suddenly suffocating in the similarities he saw between her and her son.

She tipped her head skyward and breathed out heavily one last time.

“Matty said he wasn’t there when Stick passed,” she said as though it pained her. “Said he—” she swallowed and forced the bile back down, “Said he wished he’d gotten to touch the body. He had nightmares that he’d come back. He couldn’t believe that his—that Elektra would do that to him.”

Okay. Okay, that was enough. There was technically no body or confirmation the guy was dead. They could work with that.

“What did he look like, Sister?” Barnes asked. Wade wanted to strangle him.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

“He’s tall,” Sister Maggie said over him, “He’s six feet, maybe six one. White hair. Blind; his eyes—they aren’t like Matty’s. They’re cloudy. He’s old,” she huffed a little miserable laugh, “When he first came, I thought they’d sent him because we’re a church. In case he dropped and needed his rites read on the dime.”

Aw, well. Good to know there were nuns out there with a morbid sense of humor.

Barnes nodded, then turned aside to whisper into Wilson’s ear. He made a complicated face and then whispered something back. Barnes grimaced, then nodded. He cleared his throat.

“Sister—and if you can’t remember, it’s no big deal--but do you happen to remember, or maybe Red told you: what was his, er, weapon of choice?”

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And Wade’s heart burned that it was probably the most important question they needed an answer to.

He couldn’t stand to see someone trying so hard to be so strong break down like this. It was like watching Vanessa cry over receiving an invitation to her shit dad’s funeral.

Red, your mama loves you. She doesn’t know how to say it, but she does. And she’s sorry, Red. She’s so, so, sorry.

Nelson blinked back tears of his own and soothed the sister as best as he could. Barnes started to backtrack, saying that if it was too much, it was fine. They’d work it out on their own, it was fine. Sam Wilson started to join him but Sister Maggie threw up a hand and said “stop.”

“They call him Stick because he fights with a staff,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose hard to keep herself in check. “He taught Matty to fight with a staff first.”

The room breathed out.

“Please,” the sister said, not in the voice of a sister at all, “Find him. Bring him home.”

“We’ll do everything in our power to,” Sam Wilson told her in his Captain America voice. She nodded to him, but then looked directly at Wade. She knew that he knew. Red must have told her.

He crossed his heart.

 

 

If he was a lunatic with a shitty name like ‘Stick’ and a propensity for beating children, where would he go?

Castle pointed out very fairly that Stick appeared to have graduated to beating his adult children in the last few years and Wade decided that that was true and amended his earlier statement.

Excellent. If he was a lunatic with a shitty name like ‘Stick’ and a propensity for being a raging abuser on top of his gold star in the not-dead category, where would he go?

“Safehouse.”

“Bunker.”

“Back to base.”

“Back to—Barnes, fucking _no._ You might go back to base once, but you ain’t stay there. That’s just asking for trouble.”

Barton had a point for once.

“That’s not Stick.”

Silence.

“Well what’s the story, morning glory?” Wade sang to their once-departed, now articulate friend in her pretty black murder clothes.

Elektra had evidently done a little self-care over the last couple hours. Her eyeliner was sharp enough to kill a man. She’d artfully tied a red bandana over her long hair in a chic nineties-type of style that Wade could 100% get behind. She was wearing some new, different ass-kicking boots for the occasion as well.

“He’s a nomad,” she said.

Right, naturally.

“Who you brutally murdered?” Wade asked.

Those pretty lips curled. They didn’t need verbal confirmation.

“When I find him,” she said lightly, “I’m going to break off his other arm and make him eat it. And then I’m going to stab his heart and _twist_.”

Ah.

Important information there.

A one-armed abusive blind lunatic with a stick. Really, how could they _not_ find the guy at this point? There weren’t too many people matching that description bouncing around the planet.

“Are we going to help you in this quest?” Barton asked, “Or is this a kind of one-man revenge plot we got goin’ on now?”

Elektra stared at him with her lips slightly open for a moment, considering.

“You’re an archer,” she said. Hawkeye gave her a thumbs up. She stared at Barnes. “Sniper.” Castle. “Sniper.” Wade. “Sniper.” Wilson. “What’s your deal?”

Wilson shrugged.

“Air support,” Barnes said for him. “And medic.”

Elektra rubbed her lips together in approval.

“Medic, you stay. The rest of you. Sniping isn’t going to work. Stick can sense shit coming. What else you got?”

“A can-do personality?” Wade offered. She bored holes in his mask with her eyes. Alright, so now is not joking time, got it. “Explosives expert,” he amended.

“Thank you. You stay. Next.”

Barnes’s special skills were terrorism and espionage. He got to stay. Castle’s special skills were terrorism and having already teamed-up with Elektra for something previously. He knew how to match her style. He received permission to stay on too.

“Alright, pack your bags, boys, we’re headed north,” she announced and with that, they broke up.

 

 

Wade had just gotten his shit together and asked his sixth question about exactly how far north Elektra’s definition of ‘north’ was when he got a text from Wilson. Ugh. Wilson.

He almost didn’t open it, but very soon came to see that the partial message included a certain not-dead Spidey’s name.

He stuffed his shit in the bag and opened it.

 

 **SW:** pete just woke up. He’s crying for you

 

Fuck.

He couldn’t. He still couldn’t. One look at Peter’s little broken body or any tears rolling down his pale chubby cheeks was guaranteed to send him right back to the starting line. The meds would help a little bit, but they wouldn’t be enough to fight that siren’s call. He couldn’t find Red if he had to take care of Peter.

Fuck.

 

 **WW:** tell him everything is going to be fine

 **SW:** man, we tried. He is not taking it well

 **WW:** sam, I can’t see him right now. I literally can’t. I ain’t got a strong enough dose to stay stable atm.

 **SW:** understood. I’ll see what tony can do.

 

What Stark could do was not much.

 

 **SW:** wade, I’m sorry man, but he’s having a panic attack. He don’t want his aunt. Is there anything you think you can do?

Fuck.

Fuck, baby boy. See? This is why you don’t get attached.

 **WW:** fuck hold on. Im getting my shit. Heading that way, eta 40

 

 

By the time he got to Stark’s fancy medical bay, Peter had worn himself out. The panic had passed, he laid listlessly and still, all wrapped up all over like a mummy. May smoothed the tears on his face onto her own skin and into his hair.

He wasn’t okay.

Wade had been lying to him this whole time and he’d known that. Peter wasn’t stupid. He had to have known that. Still, when he saw Wade come into the room without the mask, he started whining and trying to get up to greet him.

Fucking—

Ugh.

This little gremlin was going to be the death of him.

Stark looked like he’d taken four caffeine pills all at once in the corner. His buddy Rhodes stood by talking to Sam Wilson, Barnes, and Hawkeye, but they all stopped when they heard Peter’s whining.

Wade sighed and went to him. May offered him her seat but he waved her off and crouched down by the head of the bed so Pete wouldn’t have to sit up and dislodge his IV lines.

“Heya, kiddo,” he said.

Peter threw himself around his neck. His usually crushing grip was lacking, which told Wade everything he needed to know about the kid’s present condition. He pressed his cheek against Peter’s head.

“It’s okay,” he said.

Peter started hiccupping and sniffing hard against his neck.

“We’re gonna get him back,” Wade promised. “Going right now. Got his crazy sister helping us and everything.” He carefully pulled Peter out of his shoulder and rearranged him on his back, back in bed. “You’ve got a job, though, mister.”

“Let me come,” Peter hiccupped. His eyes were six shades of red, inside and out.

Ah, buddy. Don’t make this harder than it’s gotta be.

“Wade, let me come. Please, let me come.”

Fuck, no. Stop talking, honey.

“Wade, _please_ —I gotta. It’s my fault. I should have felt ‘em coming—I should have felt ‘em coming.”

Stop.

Talking.

“I fucking _said_ you have a job,” Wade snapped. He didn’t need to look up to see everyone’s flinch because he felt it himself in his diaphragm. Peter dropped his head and struggled not to start crying.

“Your job,” Wade told him more gently, tucking fingers under his chin and pulling him over to look at him, “Is to stay. Right. Here. In case he comes back on his own. If he comes home and all of us are gone, he’s gonna need someone, Pete. And I need you to be that person. Do you understand me?”

The room was tense and the sound of Pete’s heart monitor only made it tenser. It was slow, always slower than it needed to be, but Peter’s resignation brought almost full seconds between the beats now.

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t fucking like that, someone calling him ‘sir,’ but this was Peter’s way of deferring, so he’d suck it up for now.

“Atta boy,” he said softly. He ran a gloved hand through Peter’s hair. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

Peter looked up at him with his shattered heart on his face. He tugged a little at Wade’s wrist. Just barely there.

Wade sighed and gave into it. Stooped back down and wrapped the kid up tight in his arms one more time. Locked both around his back and gave him a good squeeze. Peter snuffled a little in his neck but released his grip first. Wade set him back down.

“Bring him home, Wade,” the kid ordered. “Me and him—we’re counting on you.”

Now, that was an attitude he could work with.

 

 

“Dude, who the fuck even _are_ you?”

Hawkeye was annoying on a good day, useful or not, but Wade did not have the patience for this right now.

“He was full-on screaming before you got there, you know that?”

Yeah, actually. He fucking did, thanks.

Hawkeye stopped in his tracks and then jogged a bit to catch up again. His go-bag included a high-tech quiver, which surprisingly stayed silent even as it was jostled. He caught up, then kept pace with Wade and didn’t say anything for long enough that Wade almost snapped at him to just fucking get it out already.

“You best cover up them soft spots, Wilson,” he said before Wade could execute his anger. His voice dropped all emotion when he spoke. He was serious. It made Wade waver for a second.

So it would seem that there was more to Hawkeye than his breezy laziness, too.

Noted.

“Trust me, birdman, I got maybe four and half, and they’re all about as soft as a tank.”

Hawkeye laughed even though it wasn’t that funny.

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

“Mikey, my dear. I hear you’re biting people again.”

Wow, funny. Matt had heard that, too. It was almost as if that’s why they’d crammed a piece of cloth in his mouth.

“I don’t like that.”

You know what Matt didn’t like? Biting people. Seriously, he was going to get tetanus from all these unwashed motherfuckers.

“Come on, let’s talk. Let’s come to this table together. What do you think we can do to get you to stop biting people, huh?”

Oh, so many things. Namely, not putting any more marks on his body, but a close second would be shooting him in the fucking head.

“Hey, now. You need to speak up if you want to be heard.”

The handler, who told Matt that others called him ‘Hunter’, but he would call him ‘Handler,’ stepped forward into the ice box. Matt figured that if he didn’t get to be called by his choice in name, fucking _Gavin_ didn’t get to be called by his either.

Suck it, dipshit.

Gavin knelt down next to him and waited with condescending patience for Matt to say something, like he’d done multiple times over the last however many hours. Matt didn’t acknowledge him. Not doing so pissed him right the fuck off, it turned out. He was a talker and he thought he wanted to argue. What he actually wanted was to silence; Matt dealt with people like him at court day in and day out.

“Speak, Devil,” Gavin ordered.

Please. For you? Not a chance in hell, gag or no gag.

“I said _speak._ ”

Matt felt the hand go up. Felt it come down, too. Was careful to breathe deep through it. Was even more careful to blink slowly up in Gavin’s direction afterwards.

Physically, it did him no favors. His shoulder was maybe three blows away from dislocation at this point. But mentally? It fucked with Gavin. Matt could tell that he walked these fetid halls with his head held high, and folks went around letting him. He was entitled. Used to getting his way. That much as evident from how quick he was to slap, stomp, scream, yell.

He claimed he was Chaste.

If this was the new Chaste, god _damn_ their standards had fallen. It was almost laughable.

 _You can’t control me_ , he wanted to say. _You don’t even know what you’re trying to control._

He didn’t say anything though, no. Words, in Gavin’s pretty little head, were power. And Matt had no intention of giving him the satisfaction.

He took the blows.

Daddy isn’t coming to save you, Matty. Ever again.

There was nothing in the whole fucking universe which could top that level of hurt.

This was nothing.

 

 

“Hey, maybe what you need is a friend,” Gavin thought out loud pacing the ice box. His feet sloshed through freezing water filled with Matt’s blood. Matt thought that it was probably red now. Red like the rest of him.

He was getting angry. Where before, the cold had been burning his fingers and toes and the places where his bare calves touched the floor, he couldn’t feel it now through the warmth spreading across his chest.

The devil wanted up and out. It was a good thing Gavin had stopped when he had because each impact of the staff was one step forward for the devil.

Matt wanted to know who the fuck had told him about the staff. He wanted to break that person’s knuckles.

Gavin left.

Matt gave him three minutes before carefully collecting himself and regrouping with his back against the wall.

He was tired. He was hungry. He was burning in all the wrong places. He closed his eyes, but didn’t allow himself to sleep.

 

 

He came back to awareness at the sound of footsteps coming down the long hallway. Three pairs, one Gavin’s, the other two new people. One’s pace was quicker and lighter than the others’. Gavin gave no instructions to these other footsteps.

He opened the ice box door and brought in another person. Young. Smelled clean, a novelty in this dump. Sweating and warmth focused on the center of their body, cold like him in the fingers and toes. Nervous. Heart flickering between steadiness and anxiety. It came in waves for this person.

“Got you a present, Mike,” Gavin sang. The other person’s pulse leapt. “Go ahead and do your thing. Hopefully that will improve your mood. I’ll be back in an hour.”

He left. Locked the door with the person still in the room. The footsteps waiting outside followed Gavin’s away. The person in the room’s pulse was rocketing now. But they were also awkward. They just stood there, feet growing colder, letting off all their heat.

What the fuck ever, Matt was busy being only recently ungagged. He was going to savor the lack of pressure on his jaw.

“Um, hello?”

Ah. A young lady, then.

“You’re—uh. Very, uh. Handsome? I guess. Is there any special way you want me?”

Like, metaphysically? Or—oh.

Oh, _hell_ no. No thanks, Gavin. He wasn’t a fucking rapist.

“Mr.—uh. Devil?”

If he spoke to this gal, would that be losing? Would that be giving into these mind games?

The woman took a half-step forward and then hesitated.

“I’m not scared,” she lied, “I volunteered for this, it’s fine.”

Good fucking God, Chaste. Is this the new low you’ve sunken to?

“Here, I’ll just—”

He hissed at her when she tried to touch his knee. Made as much and as loud a noise as he could without it being a word. She leapt back and he smashed himself even more tightly against the wall. Got comfortable. It was going to be a long fucking hour if this shit kept up.

“Sorry,” she breathed, “Sorry, I didn’t—are you hurt? Sorry, that’s stupid. Is there maybe something I can do to help? I could, uh. You wouldn’t have to do anything or move or anything if that would help.”

How about only over his dead body?

The woman was getting frustrated with his silence and apparent complete lack of interest in her offers. She stepped forward again, bolder this time.

“It wouldn’t be rape,” she said, “I’d do it for the Chaste. I’ll give you my full consent.”

Ahahahahahaha.

Still rape.

Get fucked.

He tucked his head in and made threatening rumbly noises her way to keep her at a distance. It worked for a while. But she got bold after the first five minutes or so and tried to make another move towards him.

He didn’t _like_ to be a monosyllabic dick, but he’d also already come this far without breaking. He wasn’t about to jeopardize that for some random lady. The next time she stepped forward, moving despite his furious noises, he swung out a leg and sent her tumbling. If she was one of the Chaste, she must have been trained, but she wasn’t focusing on him as her opponent. She went down gracelessly and swore when the heels of her palms met cold, bloody water.

He felt bad about it, he really did. He brought the foot and leg back in close to him and cut out the scary noises to make sure none of her bones had popped out of place.

She was fine. They were good.

The woman sighed and pulled herself out of the water. Her heartbeat said determined, but Matt couldn’t focus on that. How long had it been? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? When was Gavin coming back?

He’d just thought of a new strategy here.

It was called “roll over and play pretty.”

He did it a lot. And it had never failed to date.

“Am I not good enough for you or something?”

Oh, for the love of Christ. Girl, now is not the time or the place to be airing your insecurities.

“Fine, be a fucking dick. See if I care.”

Okay? He would? That had been the point the whole time?

“Do you even talk? They said you were blind, not mute.”

Who the fuck was ‘they?’ Actually, hold up. Hold everything. This right here could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

“I can talk.”

She screamed. Must not have been paying attention.

“You can talk?” she gasped.

“That’s what I said,” he replied.

“Oh my god, you can talk.”

“I talk for a living,” he said gently, “Just not to these creeps. What’s your name?”

“Oh my god, the Devil talks.”

He started to feel of his earlier irritation swirling around in his chest again.

“What’s your name?” he repeated slowly to help her along. She fumbled something in her hands, maybe part of her sleeve?

“Ruth,” she said. “Like—”

“In the Bible,” Matt noted flatly. Come _on_ , Chaste. Do better than this.

“The judge…” the gal murmured.

Oh _shit_.

Silence.

“I should have known that,” he admitted. “Sorry, I should have known that.”

“It’s fine, happens all the time—WAIT. No. You’re supposed to fuck me. I volunteered for this.”

And they were back where they started.

“I’m not gonna fuck you,” he said.

“Yes, you are,” she countered. “I’ll just—hang on. Are you gay? Is that what this is?”

He could not. He absolutely could not with this gal.

“Ruth, how old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

Nice try, answered too fast.

“Try again.” Her heart started racing, caught in her lie.

“Uh…fine. Twenty-two.”

“Uh-huh.”

“…nineteen—BUT don’t let that fool you I’m—”

“I’m fucking thirty, hon. And I got someone at home. I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last gal on earth. In the meantime, I got other needs you can help me with.”

Ruth was beyond offended, it was radiating off of her, which Matt was cool with. Anything to heat up the ice box a little.

“You’re a fucking dick, did you know that?”

“Intimately aware, yes. Where are we?”

“As if I’d tell you.”

“I will make all the appropriate noises in ten minutes here if you answer my questions. You can sit on me for a couple. No one will know any different. You don’t really want to fuck me, Ruth, we both know this. I’m giving both of us an out.”

Ruth vibrated with fury and confliction. He just needed another little nudge. It wasn’t gonna be pretty and he wasn’t gonna be proud of it, but that was just how it needed to be.

“Ruth, _please_. I can’t take much more of this. Gav—Hunter’s got my number and won’t even tell me what he wants me to do. If I just knew, if someone just told me what was going on, this wouldn’t be necessary. I’m Chaste, too, you know. They have to have told you. I owe them, I’ve got a debt to settle, but I can’t settle it like this, you know, flying blind.”

Bingo.

Ruth’s body contracted in sympathy. Hope.

Bare-faced naivety.

“We’re in the White Mountains,” she said.

White Mountains? Where on god’s green earth was that?

“You know, New Hampshire?”

WHAT THE FUCK.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.

He’d gotten kidnapped. By the shittiest version of the Chaste in the history of ever. And swept off and away to fucking _New Hampshire_???

“Dude, don’t shit on New Hampshire, _I’m_ from New Hampshire.”

“And I’m sure you are lovely,” Matt said desperately, “But I cannot exist here for another two seconds or I am going to fucking perish.

“Woah, dick alert.”

“Why do these people want me? Who are you all fighting? The Hand is in New York.”

There was a pregnant pause in the room. The dripping water around the corner echoed.

“They’re in? New York?”

Oh, dear lord Jesus. Help him. Help him, Jesus.

“Yes, where did these guys tell you they were?”

Another long pause.

“Michigan.”

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t do jack shit because this was emphatically _not_ the Chaste. Could not, not in a million years, be the Chaste or even anything remotely close to the Chaste which meant that he’d gotten his ass trapped by a bottom of the barrel splinter faction.

He was a disgrace. To life. To humanity. To his mother.

“Are you okay?” Ruth asked him nervously. “Are you, uh, crying?”

No, no. That was just his body flushing out the remnants of his dignity. Not to worry.

“Wow, you’re super uh, dramatic, aren’t you? No wonder you didn’t wanna talk.”

“Ruth, come here.”

People were headed this way and he’d made a promise. Ruth perked up and came to him and he carefully pulled her over until she straddled his lap. He could practically feel her beaming and was then smacked in the face with another realization.

“Ruth.”

“Hmm?”

“You need to sit, honey.”

“Oh, okay. Why?”

For _so_ many reasons.

“That’s how you have sex, darlin’. Have a sit. And put your arms—there. There you go. I’ll take it from here.”

“Oh, okay, great. Wait, I remember this. I watched porn once, you know.”

He _had_ to get away from these people.

 

 

Ruth thought that his noises were brilliant, spot on even, and Matt wanted to cry a little as she was led away giving him a happy little wave. Gavin was smug as he watched her go. His heart beat in pride.

Matt wanted to give that his attention, really, he did, but he couldn’t when the state of sex education in New Hampshire was as it stood. It ought to be illegal. Someone needed to get on that campaign, and pronto.

“How’s that, then?” Gavin asked gleefully, “What do you think? Ready to talk? If you’re good, I’ll let you have her again.”

For the love of God, _no._ Anything but that.

“I’m ready to talk,” he creaked out miserably.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay I cannot emphasis enough here: they did not have sex. Matt pretended they were having sex for the benefit of the other people listening in so that those folks thought that both him and Ruth were doing what they were expected to.


	6. Chapter 6

Elektra’s definition of ‘north’ was Quebec.

Wade was trying really fucking hard not to be judgmental here but seriously, _Quebec_?

“You spent time north of there?” Barton nudged as they all boarded yet another train.

“I was born north of there,” Wade grumbled. “Well. Northwest.”

Silence.

“What the fuck, did y’all think I was one of you?” he demanded. He dug out his passport and waved it at them. Castle perked up in interest and snatched it to examine the seal. He was kind of a nerd. Wade tossed his hands up and ignored it.

They were speeding towards the border, they’d have to have them out anyways.

“Wade, you have zero Canadian attributes,” Sam Wilson noted nonjudgmentally.

“As far as you know,” he snapped.

“Canadian terrorist,” Barnes tried. “No. Canadian assassin. Mm. No, no. Doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“I already have a codename,” Wade griped. Seriously, this was not a big deal. Fuckin’ Elektra over there had a Greek passport.

“I’ve got dual citizenship,” she said by way of explanation.

“Yeah, and I got a visa, big deal,” he countered.

“You oughta hook up with someone and get a green card,” she said.

“Well, that was the plan, right up until someone decided to murder my fiancée,” he said.

Yeah, that’s what he thought. Conversation over. You may all speak again when we hit the motherland.

 

 

Quebec was cold in the winter like basically everywhere in Canada was cold in the winter and these weenies were not coping well, bless their hearts.

Actually, no, Barnes was doing alright. He’d come home by way of Mother Russia, he was good. The others though? Nah, they’d done their time in the sand and then they spent all their lives bopping around the city. Which was, to be fair, pretty cold at times. But it sure wasn’t Canada cold.

Wilson swore and burrowed into his hood. Barton tripped every hundred or so yards in the snow.

Wade could not help them. They were just going to have to learn on their own.

Elektra, who Wade would have thought would abhor the snow and cold the most, ploughed on ahead of all of them grumbling about all the things she was going to do to Mr. Stick Sensei when she got her hands on him.

She was dead set on him being somewhere in the Canadian forests. She swore up and down that it was everything about his personality embodied in one, huge, harsh landmass.

The rest of them had zero basis for comparison and so had to trust her. It was tough going though, not knowing what exactly they were looking for.

“He loves caves,” Elektra snarled when Castle had dared ask the question they were all terrified to. “Loves nothing more than a good cave.”

Right. Not more than his precious, sweet, innocent apprentices, though, right?

“Not a chance in hell. Between us and a cave, he’d pick the cave every time.”

“Why the fuck did you two stay with this guy when y’all so obviously hate each other?” Barton asked from the back where he’d been banished for putting his hands on Wilson’s bare neck one too many times.

Elektra stopped so abruptly, Wade nearly knocked her over when he ran into her. She whipped around in fury and stomped back to get in Barton’s face with a slim gloved finger.

“He beat us, strangled us, starved us, and then told us we were fucking special and that he _had_ to do it. For our own good. For the good of the mission. You know what that feels like when you’re eleven years old? Important. So we felt important and we were important and it turns out you can swallow a whole hell of a lot when you feel important. And the worse part of it is that he was right. We are important and all that suffering has meant that everything else is entirely bearable. He’s a piece of a shit and I’ll kill him for both me and Matthew next I see him, but he’s very, very rarely wrong.”

She stormed back to the front of the line and, with even greater vigor than before, tore through the snow towards the oncoming shadow of forest.

“Sam,” Barton said.

“They both need therapy,” Wilson answered immediately. Castle bared his teeth but bobbed his head in agreement.

Barnes glanced back at them from where he was next to Wade. His lips weren’t even blue. His metal arm shone like glass in the snow.

“It’s not so crazy as it sounds,” he said, “That’s just how you make child soldiers. Folks do it all over in the same way. Whoever this guy is, he knows a hell of a lot about psychology.”

Yeah, if he really wasn’t dead.

 

 

It had been years since Wade had camped out in a forest in these conditions. They weren’t what he’d call ‘fun,’ but they did bring a little nostalgia with them.

“Where are you from exactly?” Barton tried.

“A little town in none of your fucking business,” Wade told him pleasantly. He confiscated the matches.

“Oh, crazy. That’s the same place as me, only mine’s in Iowa.”

Someone put this man to sleep.

“Hey Castle, where were you born?”

“Hell.”

“Nice.”

Wilson was losing his will to live. Barnes leaned over and gave him a cute little peck on the cheek to break up some of the horror.

Elektra was insistent that they try to find a cave in the dark. She was insistent that it would be easier to find a cave in the dark than it was during the day, but this was Wade’s turf now. They were not going spelunking after sun-down, not a chance in hell. That was asking for trouble and Wade was the only one out of the, fuck, six of them that had a second shot at it all if everything went south.

Uh-uh. They were all taking a nap, and when it was light again, they would go spelunking.

Elektra threw herself, cocooned in her sleeping bag, into the snow to pout.

She and Red were terrifyingly similar in the dramatics department.

The others hunkered down and Castle claimed first watch. Wade didn’t know what he thought he was watching for, but he seemed paranoid, so Wade let him have it. Why not?

 

 

The morning came with Elektra harassing each and every one of them to wake the fuck up individually. She was actually the worst human in existence. Wade knew now.

When he got Red back, he was going to cradle his adorable mop and regretfully inform him that he was going to have to murder his sister.

“Up, up, up!”

Barton nearly took the gal’s arm off when she shook him, but she was not put off by any means. Barnes, thankfully, woke up before she could do anything to him.

“Up, up, up!”

She dropped herself right onto Castle’s stomach. He made the appropriate noise and heroically laid absolutely still like a dead man.

“Francis,” she cooed. “It is morning.”

“Elektra,” he said, low and dark with the same intonation. “You are manic.”

“Just a little,” she conceded, “It’s a new day. I have an axe to grind and a sensei to find. UP.”

 

 

Morning Elektra was loads more fun than Night Elektra. Morning Elektra had regained her sense of humor and could keep up with Wade, hustling through the trees, on the hunt for a cave. They drew a circle on a map and divided off into the cardinal directions. Barnes called North, longing for colder pastures apparently. Castle called East and told Elektra to get her shit together, she was coming with him. That left Wade and Hawkeye and Wilson to decide who was going South and West. Hawkeye announced that he wanted South, which left Wade and Wilson with West.

Wilson was strongly displeased with the general state of things, but he was a good sport about it.

With a new, more methodical plan in place, they once again broke up for investigation.

 

 

“Let’s say we find Stick, what are we supposed to do with him?” Sam asked tromping through frosty underbrush.

Wade scraped snow off a pile of rocks which might have led to the opening of a cave. It didn’t. He moved on to finding more rocks to dust.

“We pin him down and ask him what the fuck he’s done with Red,” he said.

“Well, what if he didn’t do anything to Red?” Wilson countered.

Wade examined a large bit of rock jutting out from the side of a trail. The space under it could almost be considered a cave, if a cave had the diameter of a five buck umbrella.

“Then we ask him to help us find Red,” he said.

Wilson scoffed.

“Doesn’t sound like Elektra wants him to help.”

“In the case that he doesn’t have anything to do with it, then Elektra doesn’t have much choice, and neither do we,” Wade said. He paused in his examination of another rock formation a few yards away from the almost-cave. “You’d be surprised, Wilson. People like this Stick guy, they put on a big talk about hating their students, but nine out of ten times, they take an insult to their kid as an insult to themselves.”

They routed around for a little while without talking. Then Sam stood up and stretched his back. He dropped his hands to his hips, surveyed the snow settled thinly on the masses of branches and dead leaves around them, and sighed.

“Wade, why do you act like such an asshole all the time?” he asked, point blank. “You’re clearly not a moron.”

That, my friend, is called deception. And it works magnificently if you build your whole life around it.

“I am a moron,” he said instead. “I’m just an experienced one.”

 

 

They’d been searching for around two hours when someone whistled like their lives depended on it. It was a familiar sound.

Castle. And Elektra.

Pack it in, boys, we’re headed East.

 

 

They ran into Barnes standing at the center marker of their circle before they crossed over into the east side of things. He was waiting for Hawkeye and looked like one of those husky dogs with the different colored eyes. Only he had different colored arms.

“Been out here for two hours and ain’t even found one cave,” he griped.

Hawkeye crashed down to the forest floor next to him out of a tangle of branches above. A load of snow and shit came down with him, and miraculously, he popped up on both feet with a semblance of grace.

“I found two,” he announced. “Frozen spring in one, took a picture for Nat, here, wanna see?”

No, they didn’t, thanks man.

He showed them anyways.

Wilson eventually had enough of this and threw an arm around his throat. He dragged him out of the circle and to the east that way.

 

 

They only knew where Castle and Elektra were because Elektra’s voice occasionally bubbled up to a decibel fairly clear to the human ear, even from a distance. Castle turned towards them when they approached with what Wade could only describe as supreme secondhand embarrassment. He looked two minutes away from putting his hands over his ears.

There was, in fact a type of cliff about fifteen yards from where they stood and it arched further out over the forest floor than any of the formations Wade and Wilson had come across did. It must have been a really old boulder because its guts were eroded away and a crude type of tunnel had formed a couple feet away from the sharpest point in its base.

There was smoke emitting from the shallow tunnel and a tall man with white hair and a lumberjack coat stood outside it in the snow while Elektra occasionally paced around him in a circle.

He was scrawny in an old-person kind of way, more wrinkles than flat skin at that point, and he crossed his arms over his chest and watched, almost disappointedly, as Elektra conveyed, in the best way that she was able, how she felt about his continued existence.

Wade noted that he did indeed have two arms, not one, and he was, in fact, not looking at Elektra, so much as he had tipped his chin down in her general direction.

The old man’s eyes were a milky blue.

He did not look like a sensei.

He looked like he needed a wheelchair to get to his gate at the airport. He looked like the kind of guy who still gave his grandkids nickels to go buy themselves something nice from the store.

“Ellie, you’re not making sense,” he rasped.

“ _Don’t_ call me that,” Elektra snarled, then whipped around to get in his face. “And _don’t_ lie to me. You know where he is, don’t you? You put these people up to this—this is Chaste, isn’t it?”

The old man was unphased by her tone.

“I’m not associated with Chaste right now,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” Elektra said. “You’re _always_ with Chaste. And if you’re here, then they’re—”

“Chaste is rebuilding,” the old man interrupted irritably, “They brought me out there to oversee it, although I’ve found that I have other priorities, which I’m sure _you’d_ understand.”

Elektra’s nose wrinkled with the amount of emotion she had behind it.

“You finding new kids to ruin?” she asked.

“I’m tracing the Hand’s current whereabouts,” the old man said.

“You’re _always_ tracing their whereabouts. You come back from the dead and you’re _still_ chasing their whereabouts, but you know what? You could have just asked me. _I_ trace them now. They are mine to pursue. And I have been, we were just there. Stay in your lane.”

Wow, okay. This seemed like a little bit of a miscommunication to Wade. After all, if daddy and baby are both pursuing the same people in the same way for the same reasons, wouldn’t it make the most sense if they—and this was radical, Wade understood—did it together?

“Matthew is gone because of you,” Elektra accused.

The old man slowly cocked his head to the side.

“If Matty is gone, then it’s his own fault,” he said.

Wilson gave Wade a meaningful look, and like. Right. Fair. So maybe his whole spiel back there in the woods meant exactly fuck all to these people, he’d forgotten who he was dealing with.

“Matthew is not gone, he was taken,” Elektra continued. “And I know you have something to do with it. The Hand told me you did. Who did you give his name to?”

The old man, Stick, rather--Wade figured he might as well attach this name to this person eventually—huffed.

“You have no faith in him,” he said.

“Matthew’s soft—”

“ _Matty_ was trained the same way that you were trained,” Stick interrupted, “And he is more than capable of digging himself out of his own messes.”

“You left him halfway through—you said it yourself, he needed more time. Needs more time.”

“You two aren’t children anymore, Ellie. Even if I wanted to train you, you’re both too headstrong for it now.”

Right on the money there, pal.

“Hey,” Barnes interrupted, “Listen, sir. This ain’t an issue of training or that shit. Your boy up and vanished. The scene wasn’t great. If you don’t want nothing to do with him, that’s fine, but we do, so we’d appreciate any help you could give.”

Fucking look at Barnes, being all diplomatic and shit.

Stick stared in his general direction with a sneer.

“What do you mean ‘the scene wasn’t great?’” he asked.

Barnes deferred to Wade. He cleared his throat.

“’Bout forty people showed up to a job I was working with Red and Spidey. They bombed a building, sent it down on the kid. Took ages to work my way through ‘em, by the time I got to the kid, they’d gotten their mitts all over Red and dragged him off. Couldn’t find a trace of him or them afterward. Kid’s fucked right to hell, though.”

Stick’s lip curled further. Elektra looked up between him and Wade.

“Matthew was _taken_ ,” she emphasized. “Whoever this was, they weren’t the Hand and they’re targeting him as an organization. Sensei, forty people. Bombs. There are not our people. These are not fair odds, even for people like us.”

“I know who it is,” Stick growled without preamble. “Pack up your shit, they’re in the mountains.”

He left the rest of them all standing there stupid, as if they were supposed to follow that logic.

“Does this mean he’s helping us?” Barton whispered.

They all deferred to Elektra. She looked at them with the same dead-eyed expression as her teacher.

“Duh. Yeah. Come on, get a move on.”

O….kay?

They watched her stomp off to go harass Stick some more and drew each other in for a quick round table discussion.

“That was way too easy,” Wade hissed, “There’s gotta be a catch.”

“He’s a werewolf,” Barton gasped.

“No, Barton.”

“He’s secretly ordered the hit,” he amended.

They all took a moment to consider this. Barnes shrugged.

“Better than anything I got,” he said.

“He just said he didn’t,” Wilson pointed out.

“Babe, I’ve told you a thousand times: people lie,” Barnes argued.

“Why would he say that then?”

“He didn’t say shit, he just skipped over it.”

“He didn’t know what happened at the scene,” Wilson pointed out further.

“He could be faking,” Castle said. “If he ordered it, then of course he’d pretend he didn’t know.”

Fuck.

On the one hand, it was a beautiful thing to be surrounded by people just as paranoid as himself, on the other hand, this was really making things complicated.

“Alright, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Wade said, “We need more info before we jump to any conclusions, so we’re gonna have to follow his lead on this one—it’s not like we have any better leads right now. But we gotta keep an eye on him. See who he’s talking to, all communication. See if he’s got any links to where we’re about to go.”

There was begrudging agreement from the other parties.

 

 

Wade couldn’t believe he was on another fucking train with all these people. It had been ridiculous the first time and if things kept happening the way they were, it was only going to get worse in terms of numbers here.

Damn, Red, why do all these people love you? Stop making friends. It was cramping Wade’s style.

Stick ignored all of them like a champ. A true champion. A Gordon Ramsey level of championship.

He was impressed by nothing. He knew everything. And all the things in between were not a matter of consequence.

He was weird. Eerie. Stunningly brutal. And evidently not secretly communicating with any of these other suspicious characters given that he didn’t even own a cellphone.

Wade was used to hard-asses like this type of guy having some latent paternal instincts. Yes, they worked their students to the bone, but really it was because, deep down, they loved them and wanted them to succeed.

This guy seemed annoyed at best that his kids were reconnecting with him. Mostly, he seemed put upon. He and Elektra didn’t speak on the train. They didn’t speak on the next one, and they didn’t speak over dinner, even though Elektra acted as a guide the entire time.

Wilson, apparently equally as creeped out by this behavior as Wade was, hypothesized in a whisper that maybe this was their way of keeping the peace. Wade wasn’t so sure. He had sinking feeling that Stick had never let his kids talk to him when they were together without a specific reason. Elektra might have just sunken back into the habit without thinking about it.

Wade attempted to break the ice a handful of times, as did Barton, but every time, Castle caught them and put and end to it with his eyes.

The whole experience made Wade feel a lot of emotions. Some reminiscent of his own dad, who was never to be impressed or bothered. It made him grit his teeth on Red’s behalf. Even more so as he thought about all the times Red had deferred to him. He used classic abused-kid language to do it. Head down. Shoulders hunched. Make yourself small. Speak softly.

And if this was the maker of that behavior, Wade could totally see why Red was terrified of him.

Red was a sweetheart kind of guy under all that anger and posturing. It came out especially with Nelson, but also in the way that he was always gently herding Peter or trying to make him laugh. He was clever and gutsy, and generally had a lot of personality.

And a lot of needs. Not just the emotional ones, those were pretty obvious to anyone who spent more than five minutes with him. He had physical needs. He liked to touch, he liked to be touched (when and only on his terms, but still). That’s how he navigated the world most of the time. He liked people to talk to him so he didn’t feel so isolated. He always wanted more description of what was in front of him. And he was a bit of a chatterbox if you let him go uninterrupted for a while.

Two train rides with Stick and Wade could see clear as day that Stick didn’t like this neediness. He’d probably tried to train it out of Red, but instead of doing that, all he’d taught Red to do was to deny its existence. They were still there, his needs, he just spent every second of every day fixating on them now, pretending that they weren’t there and trying to overcome them.

No wonder he had anger issues, fuck. You live in a constant loop of perceived failure and that’ll fucking do that to you.  

 

 

Wilson got off the train in New York and said that he was going to go stay with Peter and Co. He convinced Barnes to get off with him. Too many cooks spoil the broth, he said, god bless him.

“Call us if you need support when you get to him. Give us some coordinates and we’ll be there in record timing.”

Roger that. Five folks were way less conspicuous than fucking seven, that’s for sure. But it still meant that Wade was stuck with the inimitable Hawkeye, who gave no sign of letting this go any time soon.

Wade hadn’t known the guy to be so close to Red, but then again, Red had a vast array of people he ran with when he wasn’t playing tag with Wade and Peter. Maybe the two of them had finally gotten pizza or something and had bonded over their mutual bad senses of humor.

Hawkeye settled into his corner of the Greyhound bus like he was made for it. Got his fucking knees all crunched up good and close to his face. Popped on some headphones and scrolled lazily through his phone before unceremoniously conking out with the direction to wake him up at the next rest stop.

Castle and Elektra ro-sham-boed for who had to sit next to him because someone had to and Wade had already claimed the single seat behind their gang with the little grandma.

Castle won and adopted his new identity as Stick’s marine grandson with grace. The old man was not charmed. He kind of gave Castle a once-over of some type, chuffed derisively, told him he needed a bath, and then returned to squinting out the window at nothing.

Elektra informed Castle that there were no takes-backsies and threw her legs into the negligible space in Hawkeye’s lap.

Wade took the moment before the bus started rolling to introduce himself to his new seatmate, and Lucia was absolutely lovely. She told him that she liked his costume very much and that red really was his color. She found a split in one of the seams by his shoulder and declared that she had ‘just the thing’ for it.

A teeny, teeny tiny sewing kit.

Yeah, Wade and Lucia got along just fine. Which was great because, according to Stick, they had eight goddamn hours to kill.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

Gavin had a lot to say, so much that Matt kind of tuned him out after a bit. He was, Matt thought, so charmed to hear Matt’s voice after the first moment he spoke, that he’d forgotten that he’d wanted Matt to talk more later on down the line.

And that was just fine for Matt; he had more pressing issues to deal with anyways. He let the guy chatter on.

White Mountains, New Hampshire. How many trains was that? Was that even trains?

Alright, no. This was fine. He could hitchhike home from New Hampshire. Provided he changed out of this godforsaken robe. Alternatively, he could leave the robe on and throw himself in front of a police car or something; they would—wait. Did New Hampshire even have police cars? New Hampshire had to have police cars, everywhere had police cars.

Right?

Even these po’dunk country places? Right?

He needed to leave Hell’s Kitchen more. Either that or watch more TV. This whole rural vs. urban divide thing was becoming a problem.

“So, Mikey, what do you say?”

Oh, shit, right. Uh, well, your honor.

“Fuck you,” he spat.

That would do it. Whatever it was.

It didn’t. It did, however, earn him some very intense hair-pulling and some minty-fresh breath in his face.

“You weren’t listening, were you?” Gavin asked.

To be fair, Matt had earned that one.

“No,” he said.

“I’m gonna give you another chance. You want to listen this time?”

Mmmmmm, no.

“Yes.”

“Good boy.”

Oh, I’ll show you a good boy. C’mere.

“I said, Mike, that we are the new Chaste. We’ve located the Hand, but they aren’t yielding to our offensives. Won’t even give us the time of day. But you, Mike, can change that. Think about it like this—”

“You’re fakes,” Matt said.

Silence.

“What did you say to me?” Gavin asked.

“You’re fakes.”

Gavin’s teeth made a horrendous noise when they rubbed together like that. The sound shrieked in Matt’s ears. Made his nose wrinkle.

“And what gives you that idea, Matthew?”

“They won’t engage with you because you aren’t legitimate in their eyes,” he said. “You want to use me to legitimize your faction. This is the plan, yes?”

Silence.

Gavin cleared his throat.

“Well, yes. It is.”

“And you’ve elected to do it this way, instead of just asking me because?”

More silence.

“Hunter,” Matt said as calmly as he could manage, “I am not a dog. I have no master. I do not and have never belonged to Chaste. Beating me will not change that. Your fantasy here? It isn’t going to work. The Hand won’t fight you if I fight for you—they’ll fight _me_ , but not you.”

“WHY?” Gavin screamed, throwing his arms to the side violently. The movement and sound startled Matt. His body braced for impact. He wasn’t sure he wanted to answer.  

“If they will fight you, then we can fight them,” Gavin continued.

“Why do you want to fight the Hand?” Matt asked. “There’s no—”

He should have seen the slap coming. He hadn’t prepared for it. The aftermath lit up his face and sent a bloom of heat to his chest.

“You _will_ fight for us,” Gavin decided, dropping his arm. “With us,” he corrected after a beat. “You will fight with us, whether you want to or not.”

The words ‘make me’ danced on the tip of Matt’s tongue and it took everything he had to bite them back.

He’d hoped that he’d get some information out of Gavin. He’d hoped, perhaps far too optimistically, that he’d get him to see reason. But obviously that wasn’t going to work here.

The new goal was to get out. As soon as possible.

You could never trust the Chaste. Them or their pretenders.

 

 

Gavin didn’t like when Matt fell silent again. He didn’t like whatever he saw in Matt’s eyes. He wanted to do violence. Out of helplessness, Matt now understood. He was these guys’ last chance. They’d built up this elaborate rouse, recruiting local kids and gathering former members. Camping out at this so-called headquarters. They’d probably been making plans, debating tactics, hell, even sending some of these kids out to battle.

And yet the Hand did not engage.

The Hand was the kind of organization that would maim, murder, or recruit everyone and anyone, from the lowest scum on the planet to the most vulnerable. Refusal to engage with these so-called Chaste soldiers was perhaps the greatest insult they could inflict upon this group.

Matt could understand how that might burn. How it might rankle.

But he wasn’t some pawn in this game.

And he already had enough on his plate just dealing with the Hand day-to-day, he didn’t need a whole new organization on his back while he did it. Certainly not one that wasn’t even competent enough to establish legitimacy before jumping into the fray.

Gavin could throw as many punches and staffs as he wanted. Matt wasn’t afraid of him. He was just a desperate, helpless little man trapped inside this rat maze he’d made for himself.

Matt wasn’t afraid of a rat.

 

 

The moment the staff broke was the moment he cracked.

 

 

It was interesting how, when things came to a head, they always seemed clearer than ever before. He stood now, in a room with dripping fists and six guns pointed at him. They hadn’t been recently fired, no smell of bitterness around them yet. No lingering heat in the barrels.

“Stand down,” One of the guns ordered.

Was he the real boss?

Or was it Gun 2? Or was it Gun 3? Gun 5 was the man who had called him beautiful earlier. He still smelt like the inside of a car—new leather.

“Stand down, Michael.”

Matthew. His name was Matthew.

One safety clicked off and they all followed in a round. Matt wasn’t fast enough to dodge a bullet. Definitely not six, even if they all met at the same vertex. He heard footsteps. He heard the order repeated.

He heard hearts pounding steady.

The one that approached was unusually slow. Slow like Peter’s slow, except Peter’s heart reacted to everything he saw. His excitement and interest was easy to track from one second to the next after you got the baseline down.

This person. Tall. A few inches taller than him. Walking with presence, not haughty like Gavin.

They smelled like cigarettes.

They smelled expensive.

His fingers twitched and he heard bullets tapping against the sides of their barrels as guns shifted, trained on him.

“Michael. Matthew Michael,” the steady, tall person said. “It seems that there’s been a misunderstanding.”

Are you behind this, tall person?

“Hunter was mistaken to treat you so poorly. Perhaps we can amend this.”

This person’s heartbeat sped up a little at the idea and Matt couldn’t tell if that was because they were lying or because they were aroused by the thought. He didn’t like that. That sounded like—

“Can I touch you, Matthew?”

He took a step back. The guns moved with him.

“Let’s not do this,” the tall person said. “Let’s be calm about this.”

No.

No, this guy. He wanted to hurt Matt. He liked the hurt. Gavin had wanted action. This man wasn’t like that. Matt took another step back.

“Do you love Foggy, Matthew?”

Everything stopped. His own heart was suddenly louder than everyone else’s.

“What?” he asked.

“Foggy,” the tall person clarified, “Your partner in, well. I would say law, but I think that that is maybe just the surface.”

The noise in Matt’s ears was rapidly narrowing down to a roar. The Devil’s noise.

“Come here.”

No. No one touches Foggy. No one gets to touch Foggy.

“Come here. You’re flushing. Don’t be upset, I just want to talk about Foggy.”

Stop saying his name.

The taste of salt and iron was strong in his mouth. He must have bitten through his lip again. He couldn’t feel it. Not with the heat in his face, sinking down his chest. Not with the roar.

“Matthew, if you don’t come here, we will kill Foggy. Is that what you want?”

There was no proof. This was a rouse. This person, he was trying to bring the Devil out.

It was working.

“I’m impressed that you care so little for your friend. Even after all that time you spent together. He’s devastated by your disappearance. He went and talked to your friend, Deadpool. Deadpool thinks he can find you. What do you think?”

Wade, no. He could handle this.

“Do you believe me?”

Yes—no. Yes? No. He didn’t know. It sounded plausible. But he couldn’t know what Foggy was doing. That was the rouse.

“What if I told you that your little friend, what’s his name?”

Peter.

“Peter. He’s not doing so well.”

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. FUCK.

This wasn’t a game anymore. This was real fucking life. Gavin had been a show, something to make him comfortable. To make him feel like he had the upper hand. Goddamnit. No, Wade. Go back to Peter.

“What do you think, Mr. Murdock? Matthew? Michael? Which one do you prefer?”

It didn’t matter, don’t touch Foggy. Don’t touch Peter.

“Aw, see. You do care, don’t you? Come here.”

Come where? Why? What would happen if he didn’t?

“I don’t like how you’ve treated my men, Matthew. Come here.”

No.

“I’m not going to ask again. I will say it one more time. If you don’t come, we will kill Foggy. And then, if you’re still difficult, we will expose Peter. Is that what you want? Do you not believe that I’ll do it? Here, have a listen, I’ve heard that you can. Am I lying to you, Matthew?”

One. Two. One. Two. One. Two.

Oh, god.

Our Father. Who art in Heaven.

“That’s a good boy. I knew you’d see reason. Why don’t we stay in that vein, huh? Let’s be honest with each other. Here, I’ll go first. We are the Chaste. Not just a faction, we are the essence of the Chaste. And I don’t like what you did to Ruth back there, you know that? She is your comrade.”

Hallowed be thy name.

“Hunter says you aren’t taking your situation seriously, although I have a feeling that you just need some more context. What do you think? Do you need more context?”

Please. Don’t touch Foggy.

“I won’t. Provided you come here.”

He closed his eyes.

 

 

Gavin was an amateur. Ruth was an amateur. The bottom layer of folks in most organizations tended to be.

This man had played off Matt’s pride. His hubris. He’d built him up just to take him down and he did it much, much better than Gavin could ever hope to.

It wasn’t the pain. Would never be the pain that made Matt do anything. He and Castle were a lot alike in that way. No.

It had to be other people.

It had to be Foggy’s voice coming through a wire the tall person held for him.

It had to be the reading out of Peter’s home address. Wade’s. Karen’s. Foggy’s.

His clients’.

His dad’s grave plot number.

“Matthew. The Chaste needs you.”

He didn’t have a fucking choice.

“Come here, sweet thing. You’re so beautiful, do you know that? Do you know how lovely you are?”

He wanted to break these fingers. To rip them back so hard the tendons pulled. He wanted to hold this head and to break his own knuckles on the side of it. Over and over.

“I think you’ll be even more beautiful in white, Matthew. What do you say?”

That he wanted to scream until his throat bled. That he wanted to break these motherfucking fingers—why couldn’t he break them? He’d spent his whole life learning how to break them. For these people. By these people. And now they trailed against his lower back, in the places which only Foggy’s fingers were allowed these days.

“Sit with me.”

No. Please, no.

“Come here, Matthew. Sit with me. I want to see you in white. Tell me, do you remember white?”

White was the color of lilies. The flowers that had sat around his dad’s coffin. White was the color of paper, he remembered. White and black and gray. Things to read. White was the color of Foggy’s smile. Karen was always envying his teeth.

“No,” he said.

“That’s a shame.”

It really was. White would always show were you were bleeding.

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

Stick had said not two words for eight fucking hours and Wade and Barton had gone from irritated to impressed to concerned. Castle did not appear to care. He was typing away at a tablet which was comically small in his hands. Elektra took no notice of her companions’ concern either and, when not operating under her sensei’s thumb (that is, parked in the seat next to him), appeared to delight in poking fun at him.

She wormed her fingers between the seats in front of her and jabbed at his joints and sides and, even more than the shocking fact that he allowed her to do this, was the fact that he did not acknowledge any of it.

Hawkeye wriggled up onto his knees in his seat and whispered to Wade over the headrest “Well, at least we know who the favorite is now.”

He took damage in the form of an elbow.

“Sensei’s always loved Matthew more,” Elektra pouted.

This statement was outrageous for multiple reasons. Firstly, because it was unbelievable that the man before them was able to emote to the degree of anything resembling ‘love.’ And secondly, because he absolutely, 100% did not.

“Hey, old man,” Barton asked with no regard for his continued existence, “If Red was an annoying little shit, what would you do to him?”

And, like Nessie rising majestically from her loch, Stick slowly turned back to them all with a dead-ass serious expression and said, “I’d kill him.”

And then turned back around.

“See?” Elektra demanded, throwing her arms across her chest.

Even Castle stopped typing for a second to appreciate this.

 

 

Wade decided that Stick just didn’t feel, like, in general. He decided this as he watched Elektra chase him up the base of a load of mountains Wade did _not_ feel like climbing and so was trying to figure out a more efficient means of doing so. He briefly entertained putting Hawkeye’s energy to use in the form of dog-sled but nixed the idea when the guy slipped off a rock and took Castle fifteen feet down the cliff face with him. The old man, in the meantime, hadn’t put on any weather proofed clothes beyond the lumberjack jacket they’d found him in. He already wore boots. The only difference was that now, he had across his shoulder a solid wooden staff which he’d extricated from the guts of the bus alongside his bag.

Wade was desperate to know what was in that bag.

Barton whispered that there was probably only three things in it and he, Wade, and Castle spent the second hour of hiking trying covertly to guess what they were.

Look, it was a huge fucking mountain. They needed something to keep the spirits up.

The only other thing to do was to watch Elektra run circles around her teacher like an excited terrier while he ignored her and the universe itself. She crashed down from the switchback in front of them, showering snow and shit all over Stick and he just grabbed the scruff of her neck under her scarf and shoved her forward without a word. Obviously, ten minutes later this cycle would repeat, again completely wordlessly. And that was just fucking eerie.

“Maybe Red is the good child,” Barton said. “Maybe he’s the clingy little brother who gets all the affection and all the blame.”

Barton had some highly specific ideas about sibling relationships.

“Dude, yeah. _I’m_ a little brother. I know this shit.”

Yeah, and it showed.

“Wow. Well, come on then Wilson, what’ve you got? Oldest of twelve? Youngest of four? Only child syndrome?”

“Got a nose for nosy spies,” Wade told him, releasing an overhanging brush with enough force to slap Hawkeye in the face with it and send him sputtering.

Castle thought it was funny at least.

 

 

They got halfway up the mountain before Stick deigned to rest and give them some actual context of what they were getting into. Wade kind of respected that; there was nothing like trying the loyalty of your team before giving them admittance onto it.

The old man truly had a nose for caves; he found one in the rockface behind some snow and made them all sit in it to rub their hands together.

“The people up there are the ones who dug me out of my fuckin’ grave,” he started with. Wade mentally awarded him a 9 out of 10 for originality and drama. “They’re a faction of the Chaste.”

“I _knew_ it,” Elektra said. “Which faction? The one with the robes or the ones with the guns?”

Stick gave her a flat look.

“They’ve got both?” she gasped.

“They’re highly militant,” he continued over her. “Not that Chaste itself isn’t, but we at least can be assed to develop skill and use our fucking heads in battle. These shitheads,” he jerked a thumb up at the top of the mountain, “Wanted me to take over supervising the training of their recruits but I refused.”

Given Stick’s general attitude, Wade decided that that meant he’d thrown the whole organization into chaos and had escaped to Canada. He’d probably used the trip north to alert the rest of the organization of what was going down before getting back on track with the work he’d left when he’d departed the mortal plane the first time.

“Why take Red then?” Castle asked. “He’s not a teacher. He can’t train their recruits in your place.”

“No, and again, if they could be assed to do some research, they would know that. No, instead, they’ve thrown their net on him in hopes for a lot of different shit to happen. They’re trying to draw me back in, for one, and unfortunately it’s working. They also think that Matty can be made to train, which should be entertaining given that he knows fuck all. And because he’s so goddamn soft, they probably want to break his arms and then see if they can’t use him to spearhead their efforts against the Hand.”

Wade kept mum on this. He had actually seen Red teach before and he wasn’t as horrible at it as his dearly beloved sensei seemed to think. Red spent quite a bit of time and energy trying to get Peter to fight like he knew what he was doing, for the sake of the team, yes, but also for the sake of Red’s own blood pressure. And the kid had come a long way under his tutelage, if they were being honest. Red was a firm, but fairly hands-on teacher. He dragged Pete to hell and back in a brutal weekend-long session at least once a month, and Pete usually came bouncing over to Wade sometime during the following week to show Wade what he’d learned.

Which meant that Wade now spent a lot of time pretending to be in pain with the kid. He’d looked up how lions and shit teach their young after the first of these interactions, which had resulted in Peter pouting at him and generally being upset that he had not appropriately responded to his poor attempts at MMA. The internet said that, in the animal kingdom, it was important to mock pain and upset to encourage skill development.

Peter was a spider.

It worked pretty well on him.

“Okay, on the off-chance that Red refuses—” he started.

“Boy’ll refuse in a heartbeat,” Stick said without hesitation. “They’ll beat the shit out of him ‘til he gives in. Probably start threatening his goddamn boyfriend.”

Stick…was unsurprisingly blasé about this whole thing. Castle saw the issue with greater gravitas.

“Red won’t last under torture,” he said. “What happens then?”

Both Stick and Elektra made complicated expressions. Barton looked between them and then to Wade, and then to Castle.

“You don’t think he’ll break?” he finally asked.

“If he breaks, I’ll break him myself,” Stick snapped just as Elektra said, “He’ll snap, not break.”

“Okay, so when you say ‘snap’—”

“He’ll lose his temper and dig himself a goddamn hole,” Stick said as though the thought pained him. “The guy whose running this fuckin’ org wants exactly that. And Matty’s a complete moron and will give it to him. But he’s not the object here, Matty’s a subversive little shit. He’ll do what he usually does and fuck everything up from the inside. What we need to focus on is breaking up the faction.”

Elektra lit up.

“Kill the big man?” she asked, more like someone seeking permission than offering a suggestion. Stick surveyed her with his cloudy eyes.

“Make the big man surrender,” he said more carefully.

“Then kill the big man?” Elektra asked hopefully.

“This is political, Ellie. We want to retain the recruits even while putting down the faction.”

Elektra had no time for politics. She grumbled to herself. Then froze.

“I’m not fucking going in there as Chaste,” she announced. Stick made, for the first time ever, an exasperated noise.

“You _are_ Chaste.”

“Am not.”

“You and Matty are both Chaste.”

“No, we are independent entities. Hell, last I checked _you_ didn’t even want to be Chaste anymore. What happened to “insufficient methods for insufficient goals,” huh?”

Stick turned just so that his staff whacked her in the back of the head and returned to the other three.

“You are not Chaste, but this must appear to be a Chaste-led coup. Ellie and I can do that, we’re known among these people. What you need to do is find Matty and make sure he’s not gonna fuck up all the groundwork.”

Oooh. A conspiracy. This was exciting. Barton thought so too, precious little spy that he was. Castle was less sure.

“Shouldn’t the object here be to remove Red from the situation?” he asked.

“No. Too obvious,” Stick said. “Also the kid needs to learn his goddamn lesson.”

Ah, there’s the willful neglect, Wade saw it now.

“Ellie and I are going to go through the front. That’s what this guy wants. We’ll make an offer of unity based on the conditions of the recruits. They’ll try to hide Matty, he’s their bargaining chip. You three will find him from inside and tell him to defer to my order. Then y’all will leave and we will wait.”

Wade wasn’t great at waiting. And he had a bag of bombs. As far as he was concerned, this whole thing was an open and shut case.

“Okay, so where’s the part where we take Red home?” Barton asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Not a great fuckin’ answer, old man.

“Ellie, we’re going up top,” Stick decided, rearranging his decrepit bones vertically, “You three, there are dormitories facing the south. One of them has to have an open window. If not, make one.”

Fuck you, sir. Wade took orders from no one.

 

 

 

Another three hours of hiking sans beautiful murderess and her not-so-trusty companion and Wade and his slightly-more trusty companions found themselves staring at a rock face trying to figure out if those weird holes in it were windows or pockets in the honeycomb of a giant, monstrous hive of rock bees.

Castle thought they were windows.

Closer inspection revealed this to be mostly true and revealed Barton to be shit at rappelling.

Even closer inspection revealed that the windows were made of glass which was very sharp and pokey when shattered.

They were in. Apparently in a college freshmen’s dorm room, but what the fuck ever: in.

They tripped over the metric fuckload of novelty pillows and make up and clothes and found themselves in a hallway, which was thankfully empty. Castle made a gesture downwards and both Wade and Barton looked at his crotch before understanding.

They went on the hunt for a stairwell.

 

 

No stairwells, it turned out. Rocks weren’t great in the infrastructure department. There was, however, a series of ladders that fell through sudden drop-offs in the floor from one to the next one. So they elected to climb down.

The place was deserted, it seemed. Then it dawned on Wade that Stick and Elektra might have already gotten there and requested an audience or a viewing or whatever the fuck it was that they wanted with these scumbags.

“Maybe there’s a cafeteria?” Hawkeye thought out loud as they dropped into an even lower part of the building. There was a soft sound in the background. Castle covered Barton’s mouth as he and Wade tried to figure out what it was.

It sounded like…water? Some kind of stream or creek or something trickling down. Probably snowmelt actually.

They decided to follow the water.

It led them to a light, little alcove in a corner where a grate had been fitted in a hole in the rock which itself acted as a tiny window back out to the mountain. Water weakly trickled over the edge of the hole and several plastic buckets stood in a row under it, collecting the water, presumably so it didn’t flood the room. It looked like someone had started to put a drain in, in one of the corners of the alcove, but hadn’t finished.

Barton demonstrated for all of them that the water was indeed snowmelt. He hissed and someone sniffed somewhere in the passage behind him. They all leapt up in the air.

Sniffing meant people.

Sniffing meant potential conflict.

They drew their weapons, then advanced down through the passage.

 

 

There were two cells down along the passage separated by a huge hunk of rock. Barton had to stand on his toes to see into the room. He reported that they looked hella wet inside. Castle and Wade didn’t need this information because the entire passage was drenched, filled with little pools of water. That’s kind of how caves worked.

“Hello?” Barton called softly in the first cell.

No answer.

“Hi? Hello? Anyone in? Dead folks, living folks, folks of the living dead variety?” he tried after a moment.

Still no answer.

Wade stuffed the barrel of one of his gun in the window of the adjacent cell and rattled it around like it was a triangle.

“Roll call,” he said into it.

Still silence.

“Well, damn. All these cells and no prisoners,” Wade sighed.

Someone sneezed. They all panicked again. Collected themselves. Searched for the sound. It wasn’t in the passage. It was around one of the corners of it. And it wasn’t just a sneeze, someone had a full blown cold. Castle flattened himself against the wall and Wade and Barton followed his lead.

They crept over to the bend in the wall and peeked around to see a gal sitting there, moping with her back against the wall and a mop in her hand. So it would appear that they’d found the one tasked with soaking up the snowmelt.

She was young. All in white. No fucking shoes like an idiot. She’d stuffed a footstool against the wall and looked very forlorn. Sort of Cinderella-y.

She sniffed.

“Everyone shut up, I got this,” Wade whispered.

He collected himself and adopted a swagger. And a whistle. He made his way down the hallway in the girl’s direction. She didn’t look up when he passed.

Okay. Weird. But no matter.

He doubled back from the end of the corridor, still whistling.

The girl still did not look the fuck up. What the hell?

Alright, fuck this.

“Hey,” he said.

The girl screamed and fell off her stool into the water around her feet. It had to have been cold.

“Who are you?” she demanded, launching herself up back up on her feet, mop still in hand.

“Deadpool,” he said, “Yourself?”

A pause.

“Oh. I’m Ruth.”

Ruth, honey, you should never talk to strangers.

“Hey, Ruth, nice to meet you. I’m looking for a friend of mine. ‘Bout yay big, kinda ginger, very blind?”

Silence.

He locked a hand over Ruth’s mouth before she could get the scream out. He eased her backwards until her back was against the wall and his gun was pointed comfortably into the underside of her throat.

“We are going to be _very_ quiet, Ruth,” he told her. He nudged the gun into her skin a little so she could feel it. “And then we are going to tell me where our friendly, neighborhood hothead is. Yes? Is that clear?”

Ruth nodded against his hand. He left it there for a few long moments until he was sure that she wasn’t going to scream anyways. Then he pulled it back.

“You can’t have him,” was the first thing she spat, “He’s our comrade. He told me so himself.”

Bingo. Red, located.

Also, Red, lying? Holy shit, he was so proud. All those lessons were finally paying off.

“Where is he, darlin’?” he asked.

“None of your business.”

“He coming back here?”

“I said, none of your—”

Ah, he didn’t like to do this.

Actually, that was a lie, he did. He totally did.

He clicked the safety off. Ruth’s whole body locked up.

“I heard what you said,” Wade told her patiently, “I’m just wondering what exactly you _meant_.”

Ruth was young and under all that bluster, she was actually pretty strongminded, Wade would give her that. It took more nudging to get her to talk than it did some of his local gang leaders.

“Don’t hurt him,” she suddenly burst forward, on the edge of tears, “He’s really nice.”

Don’t—?

What, seriously?

“Ruth,” Wade asked slowly, “What exactly do you think I’m going to do to him?”

Ruth had a whole lot of ideas. They weren’t exactly PG. They weren’t too well described either.

“Honey, no. He’s my friend. I’m here to save him.”

An awkward silence.

“Save him? From who?” Ruth asked.

Wade heard Castle slap a palm over his face somewhere around the corner. It had to be Castle because Barton could only be delighted by this turn of events.

“Y’all,” Wade explained.

“Why?”

“Because y’all kidnapped him to begin with?”

Ruth scoffed.

“No, we didn’t. The Hand did. We got him back and then he didn’t respect Hunter, so he got in trouble. And then he still didn’t listen Hunter, so we had sex and now he’s listening better.”

Wade thought maybe he was having a stroke for a second before he realized that that was just shock and disbelief causing his brain to short circuit.

“You. And Red. Had sex,” he clarified.

Ruth was very proud of this. She lifted her chin as high as she could above the barrel of Wade’s gun to nod.

“Yep. He made the noises and everything.”

“Right,” Wade said. “Lots of moaning. That kind of thing?”

“Yep.”

Right. Yes. Except here’s the thing. Wade and Red had fucked. Red did not make much noise. He was a gasper and a whimperer and if you started to do something he decided was not up to par, he’d slap the shit out of you in the middle of it all, but he didn’t do the whole moaning thing. He said he left that to his partners, it embarrassed him. He had a great story about this guy Justin he’d fucked in college who had gotten off on sex noises but Red had been so put upon, upon receiving this information that he’d just started making them up as he went along. Then Justin wanted to record the sounds and Red had been so horrified at the thought that he couldn’t make them in the moment—and anyways, they broke up shortly thereafter upon Red’s learning that Justin didn’t consider their whole relationship to be anything short of heterosexual. You know, just a bro-thing, man? Just some bros touching dicks. Some dick-touching bros.

Red still had some strong feelings about Justin every now and again. Namely, when he was drunk and needed a target to hurl invectives at.

“Well, congrats,” Wade told her, trying not to die at the thought of Red reliving his traumatic Justin experiences in one of these cold-ass fuckin’ cells with this girl.

“Thank you.”

“You happen to know where he went after he was with what’s his face?”

Ruth thought about it.

“They took him out of here last night and he hasn’t been back since,” she said.

“You think he’ll come back?”

Ruth shrugged.

“Probably if he’s disrespectful again. I dunno, though. My roommate said that rumor has it that he almost killed Hunter last night, so Commander Warness is keeping a personal eye on him, but I don’t believe that.”

Oh, Red. Wade was so proud. He’d been so close to murdering his captor. He dropped the gun and Ruth. She rubbed at her neck and edged away from him back towards her stool.

“Thank you for your service,” Wade told her.

“You’re not going to hurt him are you?”

“Who, Red?”

“No, the Commander.”

“Nah.” That was the other twos’ job. “We’re just looking for our buddy, that’s all. Hey, where does your commander live, though?”

Ruth glanced between his face and the gun in his hand nervously.

“I don’t actually know,” she admitted.

That was fine. She’d already done enough.

“Alright, thanks darlin’. We’ll be off.”

“Wait!”

He paused and turned around slowly. Ruth had her hands on her hips.

“You owe me a favor.”

Oh? Did he now?

 

 

Ruth’s favor for her silence was exchanging the now full bucket of snowmelt under the little rock window for an empty one.

Ruth was a simple girl with simple wants and simple pleasures. Wade almost asked her if she needed anything else done before slapping himself back to reality.

They left her where she was, sniffing away and avoiding mopping, on the hunt for the commander’s quarters.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

Matt thought that it was really fucking telling that this guy wanted him to call him ‘Commander.’

Chaste didn’t use such labels. They were all ‘Stick,’ ‘Stone,’ ‘Archer,’--that kind of shit. A shitty, single-syllable name with no context whatsoever was the tell-tale sign of a true Chaste warrior. They called him ‘the Devil,’ apparently, these days so even his traitor ass was technically higher up in the real Chaste hierarchy than fucking ‘Commander Warness.’

Furthermore, Warness had hideous breath. And was threatening the lives of Matt’s friends and family, in addition to his own identity—but more pressingly, bad breath. And gropey fingers.

Matt had complaints.

The guy was a fucking creep and he’d dressed Matt up all in white himself and had then spent a whole fifteen minutes petting him in his new robes, telling him how beautiful he looked.

Matt. Had. Complaints.

“Devil, come here.”

This man had no ability to use his perfectly functional legs. He was always ‘come here’ this and ‘come here’ that. Matt went, though. Family, friends, identity and all that.

“I need you to do something for me, for us,” Commander Warness said. He pulled at Matt’s hip a little. Matt had come to learn, over the last few days, that that meant he wanted Matt to sit in his lap.

He decided he’d had just about enough of that. He dropped down by the Commander’s feet instead and directed his gaze into his lap. The guy didn’t know what to do with this show of deference, which was yet another sign that he was a fucking pretender.

Here Matt was, reliving all this trauma, and this guy didn’t have the decency to even appreciate it for what it was.

He was going to skin him.

No, bad thoughts. Those were Devil thoughts.

He was going to break his ribs.

Better.

“What do you need?” he asked his lap. The Commander decided that he liked this.

“I’ve received word that your teacher has rejoined us.”

Oh _shit._

“He wasn’t so amenable to our request last time we spoke, even after all the effort we went through to reconnect with him, but I am pleased to see that he cares enough about you to come back to rethink his decision.”

You dumb motherfucker. Raising Stick from the dead for _any_ reason was asking for sweet death yourself. Fuck. He could not be serious.

“What decision?” he asked instead. The Commander didn’t want to say. His heart did something complicated and his heat changed, moved inwards away from his fingertips.

“Chaste needs someone to oversee the development of our recruits,” he said. “You are an example to us, Devil. If we want to accomplish our goals, then we need to train an army of warriors just as skilled as yourself.”

Ah, yes, of course. And Stick was just going to provide that service willingly, out of the kindness in his heart.

Fat chance. Deep down, Stick hated the Chaste, somewhere in the range of how much he hated shoes and Matt himself and only marginally less than he hated the Hand. If he’d left this org, then he didn’t think it was worthy of being brought into the fold of the rest of the organization.

He’d come back, however. That was unexpected. Why would he come back?

“You are going to persuade him,” the Commander ordered.

Matt could not laugh at this man in his present situation, no matter how badly he wanted to. As if he, Matt Murdock, was going to persuade Stick to do any damn thing. No, what was going to happen was that Matt was going to step out into Stick’s sense bubble and die instantaneously.

The old man would be disgraced by Matt’s capture and failure to maim and murder the Commander.

He’d murder Matt himself before any further dishonor could be brought upon his name.

“Stick won’t be persuaded by me,” he said carefully.

“Yes, he will. He’s already asked for you.”

Ahahahaha. Time to fuckin’ pray, y’all.

“Get up. Go talk to him.”

Ahhhhh, heya Dad. Not much longer now.

 

 

Matt didn’t so much walk as he was dragged down through the corridors to wherever they were keeping Stick. Some huge guy had a strong hold on the back center of his shitty white robe. He didn’t let Matt stop moving.

But something wasn’t right.

He thought he smelled something. Something familiar on the steps of one of the ladders the guys around him pushed him down.

Smelled like allspice and soap. Detergent.

He got his head whacked against the ladder rungs for taking too long and the scab on his lower lip busted so that all he could smell was salt and iron again.

 

 

He smelled Stick long before he was thrown into the room with him. It wasn’t a comforting smell. Nostalgic, maybe. In the type of nostalgic way that a pediatrician’s fishtank smelled. In the way that mildew smelled in the orphanage foyer back in the Kitchen.

He thought he’d never smell that particular combination of pine and heat and salt ever again, but there they were. This was his life. He shouldn’t have been surprised to pick out some out of place citrus and floral scents among all the pine, though. Elektra. She was what brought Stick here. It had to be her. Someone must have told her that Matt had gone missing.

The Commander’s men thrust him into the room and didn’t leave it. They wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to turn on them.

He heard Elektra’s pulse flare at the sight of him. He must have looked a fucking mess all around that pretty robe. Stick’s heart twitched up a bit. Anger. Irritation. Disgust.

“You smell like shit, boy,” he greeted. That was permission. Matt sat up and kept his head down.

Elektra kept quiet, too.

Sensei was speaking. You speak when ordered.

“You got anything to say for yourself?”

This was not an order.

“Speak,” one of the guards said, shoving Matt in the back.

You fuckhead, you speak when ordered. Matt was already gonna die, he wanted a minute to get through the whole prayer for fuck’s sake.

Stick huffed. His heart slowed. Pleased. He was pleased. Good. Maintain deference.

Stick ordered Elektra to describe Matt’s injuries. She did. There were more than Matt could even feel. Stick’s heart stayed steady. He was still pleased. Pleased that Matt hadn’t broken.

“What’s he holding over you, Matty?” he asked.

This was not an order.

Stick scoffed.

“The usual, then. Kid, one day you’re gonna learn.”

Yes, it was a day called ‘never’ and Matt had it scheduled in every one of his diaries.

Stick surveyed him in his way and then lifted his head to face the guards.

“Get your man, I’m willing to make a deal.”

 _That_ was an order. And a lie. The jump in Stick’s heart said so.

The guard grabbed the back of his robe again and dragged him out of the room. He was told to stand outside the door, motionless. To wait.

But he had the order now. He could wait.

 

 

The Commander arrived and stroked Matt’s face fondly before stepping into the room. He started to order Matt to be brought back in to sit next to him, but Stick stopped that.

“Leave him outside,” he said. As though this deal would be private.

The Commander huffed but allowed it.

“Stick,” he greeted.

“You’re bold to think I give a shit about the kid,” Stick said.

“You brought your other one here,” the Commander noted. Elektra’s heart leapt in fury. She wanted to kill him. Matt wished he could shush her through the wall.

“She’s here as a guide,” Stick said simply. “I don’t need two. More importantly, I’m interested that you think you can control that one.”

The commander didn’t understand. Matt hid his smirk.

“What do you mean, control? He’s been behaving just fine.”

“Sure, he has, can’t wait to see how long that lasts.”

With an order? Two hours max.

“Have you considered my offer?”

Stick hummed in a way which anyone who knew him would knew was fake as hell.

“I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“Still not sold, Warness.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

There was a long pause as Stick sighed.

“Matthew cannot teach others to reach his standard,” he said as though Matt and Elektra were purebred dogs they were discussing. Matt would bear the indignity for now. “He’s too soft. His religion interferes.”

There was a chuckle.

“Religion can be abandoned.”

Like hell it can, motherfucker.

“You can’t make someone stop praying, Warness.”

“No, but there are ways to curb that.”

Stick was unmoved by the threat. He was generally disinterested in Matt’s life outside training and maiming, though, so that wasn’t anything unusual.

“Perhaps you have an alternate recommendation?” Warness asked.

“Perhaps,” Stick said.

Silence. Warness was uncomfortable. He didn’t want to give in first, but Stick sure as hell wasn’t going to.

“Perhaps?” he finally prompted.

“I need to see the condition of your recruits,” Stick said.

Ah. Order.

“That can be arranged.”

“Then arrange it. My decision will depend on it.”

Warness was thrilled. He stood up and gave Stick a tiny dip of a bow and then rejoined Matt outside. He ran a hand through Matt’s hair and Matt shivered.

“You’re a good luck charm, Devil,” he said.

Yeah, yeah. Fuck you. He had marching orders.

 

 

Matt stumbled a couple hundred yards away from Warness’s rooms. It made the whole group of guards  stumble with him. Warness paused to look back at them. Matt righted himself and then continued to follow.

Half an hour later, he let himself drop forward hard onto the floor of Warness’s office from a seated position. The heartbeats in the room leapt up like bursts of water in surprise. He blinked hard and then pushed himself back to sitting with his hands.

The new bruise on his temple was hot.

He kept his head down and waited.

Twenty minutes or so later, he opened the floodgates. Dropped all his focus and let every sound and smell, every scrap of heat, graze of texture, hint of air crash down upon him.

It made him scream.

It made him scream _loud_. Like he was dying. He knew better than that, of course, because dying felt like dullness, soundlessness, emptiness.

This? This was suffering. Proof that he was alive.

Stick would hear him.

Elektra would hear him.

Everyone would hear.

He blacked out.

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for references to self-harm.

He woke up back in the cell. Freezing. His hands burning again.

Good.

The commander must have been embarrassed by Matt’s unintended shortcomings. He must have tried to hide him before other folks heard what was going on and before Stick or Elektra could suspect foul play in their deal.

Deal. What a joke.

Stick gave orders like the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s work. He just kind of shrieked ‘nevermore!’ at you until you understood. Over time, you got used to it, more or less, and learned how to wade through that cryptic swamp without stepping on too many snakes. Elektra, for obvious reasons, had always been better at it than Matt. Matt had to rely more on heartbeats and hope.

He hoped that this was what Stick wanted. He was pretty sure the order was ‘sabotage this fucking deal or face the consequences’ and on the Stick spectrum, that was oddly tame. Why was he being so nice? Maybe Elektra was driving it, threatening to cut his arm off again. Nah, he wouldn’t be scared of that.

This had to be politics.

He shoved himself up and took stock. Fingers? Still broken. Room? Still rock. Blood? Somehow less so, someone must have cleaned the place after he left it.

He could still smell Gavin in the corners, though.

Disgusting.

He needed more space to carry out Stick’s order. He needed more space and a weapon. He felt along the walls, around the slots in the door, around the—

A sneeze.

Well, hello.

A congested cough.

“Ruth?” he called, “Ruth, is that you?”

She was too far away to catch her heartbeat but there the tone behind that miserable sigh was familiar as hell. He didn’t have to hear her to know that she’d perked right up.

“Devil!” she cried. Her feet slapped against the rock her way and she was carrying—Lord, thank Jesus. A broom—mop, something with a long pole attached to it. She brought her warmth--her fever actually, now that wasn’t right—and her cold toes to a halt in front of his cell.

“Devil, you would not believe what happened just now,” she said with only one functioning nostril.

“No? Well, I got a story for you, too,” he said. Ruth went still and her heartbeat spiked.

“You. You didn’t kill him did you? Hunter?”

Oh, darlin’.

“No,” he promised, “I didn’t kill him, I don’t kill people. I lost my temper though, I’m really sorry about it, but there’s only so many times you can get hit before you hit back, you know?”

He wasn’t sorry. Not even a little. But Ruth didn’t need to know that. She trusted him. The ease in her tension and pulse said so.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. She fidgeted with the mop handle.

“Hey,” he said, “Can I have that?”

She paused and looked around.

“No, no, that. What you’re holding.”

“A…mop? Is it not clean enough in there? Dude, sorry. I really did try, you know, I just woke up this morning with this killer cold and—”

We do not tell teenagers that we intend to wreck chaos on each and every one of their peers before breaking the ribs of everyone in high command. Matt had learned his lesson in that from Peter. Peter was fucking strong when he wanted to be and he still had negligible respect for boundaries. He’d wrapped his entire body around Matt and grabbed onto a flagpole once, when Matt got a little too honest on the job with him.

This is why we lie to children.

“Nah, nothing like that,” he said, “There’s just some spiders in here that I don’t really want to hang with, if you know what I mean?”

Ruth executed a full body flinch.

“I hate spiders.”

“Me too. So can I…?”

Ruth guided the top handle of the mop in through the slates in the cell door. He took ahold of it and gave it a good jerk to get the head through. He took a few steps back into the cell and stared up hopefully in the direction of one of the corners.

“Hey,” he said, “Listen, I don’t mean to be an ass, you’ve already been really kind to me, Ruth. But really, you don’t sound good. You got a fever, I can tell that much. You should go to sleep.”

Ruth sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled. “Kayla and Jenny were all like ‘oh we gotta go to the assembly, can you take our cleaning shift blah blah blah’ like they care about any assembly. Anyways, they promised they’d take mine next time and I couldn’t focus for any assembly shit today anyways.”

Assembly?

Good to know.

“Is anyone really gonna know if you take off?” he needled. “I won’t say anything.”

“Yeah, they’ll know,” Ruth huffed. “Someone’s gotta empty the water.” She pointed somewhere down the hall. “It leaks.”

Matt chomped down on the ‘I’ll do it’ in his mouth and made himself think. He had a weapon now. Most people were concentrated in a single area in this place. The coast was clear. He just needed out. How to get out?

Well. He could think of a couple ways. They weren’t nice. To him or to Ruth. Some of them were kind of gross. Most of them were definitely self-harm.

Welp.

Desperate times and all that.

“Ah, I get that,” he said. “Hey, can I have some of whatever you were using on the floor in here? The uh, soap? May as well clean the place up while I’m at it, huh? Might make your job a little easier.”

Ruth was suspicious.

“Only if you don’t drink it,” she said. Evidently, she was getting wise to the world. Or maybe just his bullshit.

“I won’t drink it,” he promised.

She slapped her little feet away and, after a minute or two, came back with a cup of cleaning solution. She started to hand it through the slates and but didn’t let go of the cup even after Matt got a grip on it.

“Don’t drink it,” she threatened.

“I won’t drink it,” he repeated.

She let go of the cup. Matt raised it to her good-naturedly. Her heartbeat relaxed.

Heyo. Bottoms up, babe.

“NO.”

 

 

Wade and the others were playing a very intense game of rock-paper-scissors to decide which direction to try next in this fun game of Red Hide-and-Seek when they heard the scream. And then it was gone.

It was then unanimously decided that the correct direction to go was ‘up’ and so they went. Haltingly. Frequently having to slam themselves behind all kind of shit when little white-robed college students sauntered on by with their buddies in the halls.

A series of hiccups and the brief convincing a twelve-year-old that Wade was one of the pantomime characters there for the assembly that afternoon later found them all standing in front of an empty, fancy room with wooden floors and decorate floormats. They knew it was empty because Wade might have been a little more emotional than he thought he was and maybe, might have, sort of taken the door right off its hinges.

They were now faced with the unfortunate reality that this was some head honcho’s room and they were gonna have to lean the fucking door against the frame.

Spell it with us, kids. N-O-T-C-O-V-E-R-T.

Thankfully, Castle was a handyman. A real house husband. He could replace doors, door frames, door hinges, you name it. All they needed, according to him, was a replacement pair of hinges, a screw driver and some sandpaper.

Wade had two of those things.

“Who the fuck just carries around sandpaper?” Barton snapped at him.

Wade, for his information, was fucking ex-special forces. He did.

“Irrelevant,” Castle said. “We need hinges. Now.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, hold up, I got this,” Barton said. He jogged off down the hallway. Wade and Castle were left staring after him and then at each other.

“Do the special forces keep hinges in their packs too, by chance?” Castle asked.

“Don’t fucking know man, do marines?”

They did not.

There was the distinct sound of door being kicked in somewhere around the corner. Barton returned shortly with a set of hinges.

Wade couldn’t decide if he was a genius or a sentient type of fungus.

Castle didn’t ask such questions. He fixed the door in record time and had Wade lift it onto its new hinges. Like a madman with a saw, he sanded the fuck out of the space around the hinges so the cracks and lack of paint were less noticeable.

And just in time, too. Footsteps were coming.

 

 

The owners of the footsteps, the three of them came to realize in their new storage closet prison, thankfully did not notice the new hinges. Which was a shame; Wade was hiring Castle to rehang all his doors when they got out of this place. He was an artist, truly.

The footsteps did, however, have a great many concerns about a certain red-head who appeared to be jeopardizing their deal with Stick.

“If he hears his kid is sick, he’ll pull out of the deal,” one of them said.

Another guy huffed.

“Doubt it. You saw that guy in there, Devil was wearing all them battlescars and he didn’t even notice.”

“Paul, he’s _blind_.”

“I said what I said.”

“Man, sometimes I wonder about you.”

Wade loved henchmen with all his heart. They deserved a union.

“How long does Commander want him down there?”

“Says if he’s sensible by the time of the assembly, he wants him washed and present.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Does this look like my problem, man?”

Wade _loved_ them. Also, it sounded like he and the dream team needed to make the trek back down to the basement. These guys must have taken Red back down to the cells down there to muffle his screams. The problem was, however, that dream team or no, he, Castle, and Barton couldn’t leave this closet without being noticed.

Tricky.

Castle held up a gun in suggestion.

No, no, Miracle-Man, you’ve done enough.

Barton produced an arrow with glee. Wade didn’t know what was in the top of it, but he was counting on it being tear gas by the shape of the cannister.

No, you idiot, _we_ also need to be in that hallway.

Barton was disappointed. It was fine, Wade had this.

“On my mark,” he said.  

 

 

There was no question of the result of a conflict between two guys with questionable combat experience and three giant assholes with no less than 30 years of combat experience between them.

Wade entreated them to be nice and quiet before closing the closet door.

Alright, good work. To the upside-down.

“The what?” Barton asked.

“The upside-down.”

“Is that—”

“Dude, just don’t.”

 

 

There were even more folks wandering the halls now, and that made it extra hard to get over to the ladder drops. They got down to floor four or something, when a huge commotion started down the hall and a tall man wearing the only black robe they’d seen in the place started freaking out. He started barking orders and a whole team of light-blue robes went charging out of the room, leaving the tall guy and—hey! That was Ruth! Hey Ruth!—standing in the hall.

Ruth had her hands over her face and looked very, very sorry.

She worked down in the basement. The basement where these guys were keeping Red.

That was problematic.

The man in the black robes screamed at poor Ruth, calling her a series of names which she did not deserve, like, chill the fuck out man. Don’t you remember being like twenty years old and a fucking moron? That was a condition common to everybody.

The man tore away from Ruth after she nodded weakly at his rage and stormed off to go climb a ladder upwards. Ruth wiped at her eyes and tried to breathe. She collected herself enough to start stiffly walking their way.

It was meant to be.

They surprised her, but it was fortunate that they did because Ruth had had enough and was cranking those tears into anger.

“These people are assholes,” she hissed at them as they followed her to the bottom of the next ladder alcove. “Fucking assholes. They’re all so fucking cliquey and all they do is talk shit about each other and give orders no one understands. I’m done.”

“You tell ‘em,” Wade encouraged.

“I will. Right now.”

Castle carefully caught her before she went, with a soft ‘hey, hey, hey.’

“Before you do that, let’s process,” he said, “Gotta figure out what you’re gonna say, right?”

Ruth thought this was a pretty good idea.

“Alright, so first off, I’m gonna tell them that—”

She had a list of grievances, Ruth did. Wade felt bad for her, she’d quit her college judo team for these folks. She’d dropped out of a pretty damn good school too and now she was going to have to re-enroll and beg for her scholarship back.

Her mom, she said, was gonna be _pissed._

“And what was the final straw?” Castle asked.

“The final straw is—” she faltered, “The final straw is—”

She stared up at them and went hard.

“You guys aren’t here just to get your friend, are you?”

Whoops. Well. Caught red-handed, one might say.

“Are you gonna fuck this place up?”

“Yes ma’am, that’s the plan,” Wade told her. She squinted hard in rage.

“The Devil wants to do that, too, huh?” she clarified. “That’s why he wanted my mop.”

“Presumably, for either that or rage-cleaning. He’s got some anger issues.”

“Fuck it. I’ll help you,” she decided. “I’m packing my shit like now, anyways. Your friend is an idiot, though. He drank a cup of Lysol.”

RED. NO.

BAD IMPULSE BAD IMPULSE.

“The med team is on their way to pump his stomach.”

RED YOU FUCKING IDIOT WHY.

“Pretty sure he wanted to get out of his cell. I don’t have the keys. He’s kinda smart in a dumb way, you know that?”

INTIMATELY.

“You should go down there, he’ll probably—”

She stopped. They all stopped. Something was going on. There was a riotous commotion echoing up from the next set of ladders.

“Oh, that was fast,” Ruth hummed. “Usually takes longer than that to pump someone’s stomach.”

 

 

Wade crashed into the next floor just in time to see Red standing in a circle of incapacitated medical personnel. He had a splintered pole resting on his shoulders, evidently one which had recently been divorced from its mop head.

The guy was covered, head to toe in bruises. He stood up out of his crouch and cocked his head. Then lit up like Christmas.

“Wade? Wade, is that you?”

You motherfucker.

“What are you doing here?”

Asking around like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like he hadn’t laid all these poor souls out flat. Like he hadn’t just _drunk Lysol_.

“Woah, are you…mad?”

“RED.”

Hawkeye launched himself forward to haul Red into a hug from the side and swing him back and forth. Red hissed in pain.

“You shithead, we’ve been looking all over for you,” Barton sang. Red pushed at his face and yelped when he dropped his make-shift staff. “Did you really drink Lysol, man? Now, _that_ is some dedication.”

Red managed to wrangle himself out of Hawkeye’s grip and to recollect his stick.

“Of course I didn’t drink Lysol, how stupid do you think I am?”

A long pause.

“You know what? I don’t need saving. Y’all can go home.”

“If you didn’t drink it, where’d you put it?”

“Can’t you smell—shit’s all over me, here.”

“Oh wow, no, you can smell it.”

These two. Wade was going to kill both of them. Castle too, apparently.

“Red,” Wade ground out, “Here. Now.”

Red and Hawkeye paused in their idiocy and Red sheepishly stepped over all the bodies between them. He really was a mess. Under all that blood, he was nearly purple. Someone had beaten the shit out of him. His shoulder seemed stiff and two of his fingers didn’t straighten when the rest of his hand flexed nervously.

“C’mere,” Wade told him. Red hesitated again but stepped into the hug. “You,” Wade snarled crushing him into his chest and pressing a hand firmly against the back of his head to keep him there, “Scared the living shit outta me.”

“Sorry,” came the muffled answer somewhere between his tits.

“Your teacher is an asshole and your sister is a menace.”

Red laughed.

“And you need so much therapy. And now I need so much therapy.”

Red’s shoulders shook when he laughed and he squirmed in Wade’s grip until he loosened his arms.

“If it helps any,” he said, “I’ve been having a pretty bad time, too. The guy in charge of this place calls me ‘sweetheart.’”

UGH. Nasty. They were leaving. Now.

“No,” Red said, pulling back.

No? Castle reached forward and got a grip on his arm, but Red shook him off.

“No. Sensei gave an order,” he said.

Sen--? Oh, for the love of Christ, not this bullshit.

“Red, that guy is a—”

“Sensei gave an order. I can’t go without following through. He wants—”

“Red. Matt. Listen to me. He’s an abusive dickhead who doesn’t give a shit about you or Elektra. He’s just using you—”

“I know,” Red snapped up at Wade. He softened. “I know. But he’s still _my_ abusive dickhead and this is my life, Wade. Giving into this fuckhead Chaste pretender is doing nothing for nobody. He’s threatening Foggy, Wade. Peter. Karen. You. He’s got all my people under his thumb and he’s got guns on ‘em. I can’t just leave that kind of threat standing.”

Red threw the makeshift staff away like it burned him. And Wade realized for the first time that he’d never seen him fight with a staff before. Using it must have been skirted around that line between efficiency and trauma.

“I know it sucks,” Red continued, “But these people brought Stick back and that was their mistake. He’s the only one here with enough experience and connections to put this faction down for good. I don’t know anyone important in Chaste. They don’t think of me as an actor in this shit, I’m just a weapon. I have to follow his lead. He’s ordered me to destabilize the deal he’s offered the head of this faction. Then I’m supposed to upset the lower ranks. Scare ‘em or something. I dunno, the second order wasn’t as clear as the first.”

Why couldn’t Red have simple, straightforward baddies like Spidey did? That would make this whole thing a lot easier. Wade didn’t do subtle well. Or politics. He avoided politics like the plague.

“Look, we don’t got time to argue this,” Castle said. “We gotta support the old man, fine. How do we do that?”

Red chewed his lip and thought about it, head twitching and eyes flickering.

“I think that a little panic among the recruits might undermine the commander’s bargain,” he said. “Stick’s basing his acceptance or refusal off of their condition and my wellbeing, obviously my wellbeing is in jeopardy, so if you can think of something that might throw the ranks off balance, we should focus on that.”

They all looked to Wade.

He crossed his arms and gave it a think.

“There fire alarms in this place?” he asked.  


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: references to rape in the latter parts of the piece. (no actual rape conducted; implications instead)

In Wade’s experience there were a handful of sure-fire ways to cause a riot.

  1. Fire alarms at 2am.
  2. Terrorism
  3. Mass poisoning



Red was iffy on most of those, even though Castle was down for all of them. Wade and Mr. Frank over there, he’d decided, were going to have a professional chat when this was all over. They were like-minded people. Wade could use a fourth guy on his A-Team.

Hawkeye, on the other hand, Wade determined that he’d never speak to again once they were out of this stone hell. He and Red were disgusting moralists. All ‘dude, you can’t poison people, half these folks are like, 20.’ Which, like, yeah? And?

“No, wait. There’s an assembly today,” Red remembered.

Nah, Wade saw where his brain was headed.

“Vetoed,” he declared.

“I didn’t even say anything,” Red groused.

“Nope, doesn’t matter. Vetoed. I got a better idea.”

“I didn’t even _say_ anything.”

 

 

Wade’s plan was great. It was simple, it was straight forward. It went like this. Red puts them puppy eyes to use and distracts the Commander for the foreseeable future. Wade and Co take this time create a little mayhem with the recruits. They orchestrate this shit so that it occurs in front of both Stick and the Commander. Stick puts on his sour lemon face. The Commander gets antsy, and then that’s Red’s cue to jump sides.

“How?” the man in question asked.

“I dunno, boo, you’re smart. Figure it out.”

“I’m not, though.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

The planning took a brief interlude into separating Red from Castle. An important note that they could not both be on Wade’s A-Team at the same time was taken down. And then they got back on schedule.

Once Red jumped ship, the ball was in Stick’s court. They’d have to consult him as to whether they were burning the place down or just leaving it to rot. Red said Stick would probably pick neither of those and some other, unknowable third option, but okay, sure. Hawkeye asked him how he knew that and he just kinda shrugged and said that’s how it always was. Hawkeye said that his kid was like that too. They were waved back to attention and Wade made the important point that he, Hawkeye, and Castle could not leave with Red and his sociopaths because, as far as anyone was aware, they’d never been there to begin with. So, whatever Stick’s rando third option was, it was going to require the damage to look like it was purely internal. That meant that Wade, Hawkeye and Castle would have to jump back out the window they’d climbed into and meet the others further down the mountainside before they get the hell out of dodge.

The escape plan was acknowledged and appreciated. And, given that time was kind of, of the essence here, they needed to get on it ASAP.

Wade didn’t really want to leave Red down there all on his lonesome again, but Red perked up and told him not to worry, he was a great actor.

No one could decide if this was a joke or not. Wade especially could not decide if this was a joke or not. Either way, he gave the kid another hug and told him to be bad, and then they were off.

 

 

Matt didn’t spend much of his time ruminating on his whole bred-to-be-a-warrior backstory because he’d spent most of his teens doing that and he’d resolved to move on with his life a while ago. That said, there was still something extremely comforting about being given orders, which he didn’t want to examine too closely. _That_ was asking for a panic attack.

But yes, anyways. He could follow orders.

He was super great at following orders.

Except for the following part, he wasn’t so great at that. Step-by-step directions were hard, there was no room for creativity or pizzazz. But that was fine, Stick’s orders this time were broad as hell and Wade’s orders fell in line with those, so all was good.

He just needed to wait.

Several of the medics started waking up again and he let them, opting instead to sit pretty and sad in the corner of his wide-open cell. Smelling Gavin’s blood somewhere around him, just there under all the new flavors of other peoples’ hanging in the air.

It didn’t take too long, maybe ten minutes, before the Commander and his ranking officers stumbled into the room and took in the carnage. Matt pressed himself up against the stone wall and tucked himself down into his shoulders.

 _It wasn’t my fault, sir_ , he tried to say with his eyes. _You left me alone and I thought you were never coming back._

The thrum of heartbeats around him made it difficult to pick out the Commander’s until he stepped closer to Matt. His pulse wavered, jumping up and down as he took in the piles of his medical officers and then Matt’s quiet deference.

He didn’t seem to know whether he was pleased or furious.

Matt made a show of sniffing a little bit in his direction and then perking up before hunkering back down into his knees. The pulse softened. The commander’s robe scratched against itself as his shoulders dropped in forgiveness.

You fucking moron.

“Now Devil, what’s this all about?” the Commander asked patronizingly. “These people were just trying to help you.”

He hid behind his knees.

The Commander picked his way through the remaining waking bodies over to squat next to Matt. Way too close. He touched Matt’s hair and Matt sunk teeth into his lip to keep himself from biting the hand. The commander sighed. He smelt like tobacco.

Little nervous, pal? Doing a little bit of chain smoking up there?

“I don’t want to punish you, Devil.” Yeah, right, you lying fuckhead. “Especially not with your teacher here. That’d be embarrassing for both of us. So why don’t you just tell me, why’d you do this? First the cleaner, now this? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were acting out.”

God, he wanted to break this guy’s teeth. The back ones. He wanted to hear that fucking crunch and grind.

Instead he furrowed his brow and blinked until his eyes were a little watery. Sniffed a little bit too. The Commander’s heartbeat slowed even further and the hand returned to stroking through his hair. His callouses kept catching on it.

“I want to be with sensei,” Matt garbled into the hollow of his body.

“What was that, dear?”

Ahem. That was ‘fuck you,’ sir.

“Sensei,” he said, leaning hard on the last syllable like a desperate kid.

The Commander sighed. People had started dragging bodies up and away behind him. Warness caught Matt’s chin in his hand and twisted his face so that he was looking up.

“Soon, sweetheart,” Warness promised, “If you’re good, you’ll be with him soon.”

Yeah, pal. That was pretty damn accurate.

Matt leaned his cheek into the hand and felt a thumb smooth across the skin under his eye.

Hook, line,

And sinker.

 

 

Wade could not say that this was the first time he held someone down as they were forcibly shaved. Hawkeye certainly wasn’t happy about it. Castle wasn’t either, trying to hack through Barton’s three days-worth of stubble while he put up one hell of a fight, claiming that he’d been fantasizing about a whole full-face kind of thing. The guy who they were borrowing the robe of moaned softly in the corner. They paid him no mind. He was fine, just dramatic.

Hawkeye, once released, looked a good five years younger and with some pomade and an attitude adjustment, could have felt it, too if he were so willing.

He was not willing.

He refused to believe that he was the best candidate for this job, despite the fact that Wade and Castle were A. huge motherfuckers. B. Recognizable motherfuckers. And C. Old-looking as hell.

“Think of it as a compliment,” Wade told him as they coerced him into the newly stolen robe.

Hawkeye did not, but no matter. The robe and the shave made him look more like the recruits wandering around the halls. The scowl could be worked on. The deep wrinkles in his forehead, unfortunately, could not.

“Anyways, now you can go to the assembly,” Wade told him encouragingly. “I hear there’s going to be a pantomime.”

“Dude, no. They’re gonna do drills and I’m gonna look like a fucking idiot,” Barton snapped.

“Good,” Castle said. “Stick’ll be watching. If you fuck up badly enough, then everyone around you’ll start to fuck up too and that’ll give him a reason to be resistant.”

Castle was a keeper, really he was. Wade couldn’t have said it better himself.

Hawkeye looked from one of them to the other, to the guy passed out in the corner, then back.

“Man, y’all suck,” he decided with a pout.

 

 

Hawkeye went to the assembly which whispering and an influx of feet in the hallways told them would be happening very soon. Wade and Castle shoved Barton into the hall and shooed him along. He went, turning back to snarl at them every ten yards or so until he was out of sight.

“You know, for a spy, he sure don’t like playing mind games,” Castle hummed. Wade wasn’t sure Barton was a spy. Maybe a spy-adjacent. Maybe a spy’s backup guy.

He found himself pleasantly proven wrong when he and Castle found their way over to the assembly after the foot traffic in the halls had petered off and the dull thrum of someone talking over a microphone echoed off the stone walls. They followed the noise and slipped behind a wall a couple yards away from a set of double doors which opened up into a large empty hall, probably usually used as a cafeteria or something. Hundreds of people stood in there in white robes with no shoes. Wade could see the twelve-year-old they’d bumped into trying to see through the gaps in between people. Barton had elected to stand behind this kid with his hands on his hips. His blond mop was just barely visible through the door.

The man on the microphone, who Wade couldn’t see and so imagined as a guy wearing a referee-striped robe with a whistle and a bunch of penalty cards stuff in his back pocket, explained to the recruits that they would be doing a demonstration for Chaste Master Stick.

This sent up a hiss of whispering. People were legitimately surprised and excited about this guy. Wade presumed that Stick showed himself on the stage or whatever because the whispering grew even more intense. One of the guys guarding the door about a yard or so around the corner from Wade and Castle whispered to his buddy, “How the fuck do you do a demonstration for a blind guy?”

“I have no idea, maybe he can hear it?” his buddy hissed back.

“What the fuck?”

“He’s _Stick._ You don’t ask those kinds of questions.”

The guy with the microphone gave a command which sent everyone into crouch. Barton became the tallest person in the room immediately. He blinked around like a fucking idiot for a second and then dropped into a crouch himself. Wade nearly choked himself trying not to bust a gut.

There was a pregnant pause as apparently Stick evaluated the lone moron in the room and submitted his thoughts to the other officers around him.

Another command was given, but this time, Barton, out of left fucking field, followed it perfectly. The next four or five he could do, too. It was, in fact, impressive that he could blend in so quickly and efficiently.

Maybe he wasn’t hopeless after all.

But then he remembered that it was his job to fuck the place up and so he bungled the next one, skipped two or three and then nearly crashed right into the guy lurching in the opposite direction next to him. That guy stumbled and took the gal next to him off balance with him and both of them gave Barton nasty pointed looks. He apologized with his hands and a whisper, but not fast enough. The next command was given and the folks on his _other_ side smacked into him this time and jolted back in shock. He started apologizing to them too.

Two or three more moves in and Barton had amassed a whole circle of marginally pissed off martial artists around him, including the twelve-year-old, trying to covertly tell him to get his fucking shit together and stop fucking up everyone else’s grooves.

One of the guards around the corner made a soft noise of horror and told his buddy he couldn’t watch.

Wade had never wanted so badly to see Stick’s face. He’d probably already figured out who Barton was, or maybe Elektra was in there with him, narrating the whole thing.

Fuck. If that was the case, Elektra was probably dying inside trying not to cackle.

Barton audibly promised everyone he was doing his best and managed to get back into the movements for another five minutes or so. The commands took a turn then. The methodical punches and kicks got faster and the intensity started to amp up too. Barton waited, with impeccable timing, until the climax of the flurry and, on what was probably one of the final punch commands, went right while everyone else went left.

He took a fist right to the fucking face.

His neighbor’s face dropped wide and open in horror and Barton started swearing like a bat out of hell, asking the guy what the ever-loving fuck he’d done that for. The guy started trying to apologize, bless him, but the next command had already been given which resulted, unfortunately in both men getting laid out flat with a kick from behind.

The horror and apologies spread now from two to four people, then to seven as the stumbling and collapse of the victims threw the folks in front of them off balance, and the next command just made everything worse.

Say what you want about Barton, but the man knew how to cause a fucking scene.

“Oh my _god_ ,” One of the guards whimpered.

“I can’t, I just fucking can’t,” His guy sobbed.

“Who the fuck is that guy? Someone get him outta there,” a new voice hissed.

The disruption inside the auditorium had rippled through the crowd from the entrance and the entire group now stuttered in their movements, so as not to accidentally break the toes and noses of their friends and neighbors.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Wade could hear Barton blathering over people still. “God, I’m—man, here let me, no? Oh, how about—no, here let me help you—”

The people on stage had to be mortified. Their silence spoke volumes. Then someone started clearing their throat loudly over the microphone and ordering people to take up starting positions again, and Wade turned to Castle.

“I think that’s us done,” he whispered.

 

 

Matt was mourning the loss of his braincells. He didn’t have too many to start with and playing dumb, needy, child to this fuckhead was draining him of both will to live and intelligence. The Commander didn’t want him out of his sight; he held an elbow out to Matt and proudly acted as a guide that Matt didn’t fucking need. He seemed to think that this would give him more control over him.

Matt held on sheepishly and held his breath as much as he could to escape the smell of tobacco. The Commander had much to do. Errands to run, orders to give. The medics were restored to their bay and Matt followed along to meet with other officers who had concerns about how to impress Stick. A choreography and routine had to be agreed upon. The pairings for sparring demonstrations had to be approved and switched around frantically. Kyle from Texas apparently could not be matched with Bonita from Chicago because they’d just make the other look weaker than they were, no, instead they should be paired with Rick and Warner respectively.

Ugh.

Matt was tired. His shoulders hurt and his broken fingers were cold and fucking Commander Jackass had 100% touched his ass twice in the last half hour and he was _tired._

He caught a whiff of citrus and tried to follow it a bit towards Elektra, but fucking Warness apparently noticed this and noticed her, wherever she was, and tugged him away firmly.

Matt made sad noises at this and received a few comforting squeezes for his trouble.

“Soon,” the Commander told him.

A wave of citrus came from where Elektra must have tossed her hair. She had to have seen him. He tried to find her with his face.

“Where’ve you been?” her voice echoed softly over the others in the room. “You’re covered in shit.”

Matt made sure Warness was preoccupied looking at some document and pointed one of the fingers at his side down a few times before exasperatedly rolling his head in Warness’s direction. He then made an exaggerated sad face. He could just about hear the giggle. It made him want to giggle too.

“You’re such a good boy, Matthew,” she somewhere, getting farther away from him. “Sensei approves of the job you did earlier. Heard about it in the halls.”

It was so, so hard to repress the flame of delight at having pleased the old man. But Matt needed to get her in on the scheme, and she was moving away fast. He laid his free hand on the Commander’s shoulder in the beginning of a throw grip but didn’t follow through. Just kept it there for a second and kept his face pointed in her direction. He dropped the hand down to smooth over one of the bruises on his arm when Warness glanced back at him.

“Oh, I feel you,” Elektra’s even softer voice whispered. There was a long pause filled by the conversation next to him. “Get the man on his back and hold him there. After assembly, though. Doesn’t matter where. He’ll come to you.”

He dipped his head in acknowledgement, and then the smell of citrus was no more.

 

 

He got a bath.

Well, no; not exactly. A bath makes it sound like something nice happened to him. It was more like he got what had probably passed as a bath for humans in the 14th century. A good douse and a bit of scrubbing, so as not to alert the recruits of how exactly Commander Warness treated his top soldiers.

Fresh and almost clean, he got new, less bloody and soapy robes to wear and was then re-admired and re-attached to Warness’s arm so that he might have arm-candy for the duration of the assembly. The hall reminded Matt of the old hall in the orphanage that he and the others had eaten in. It echoed and proved itself much larger, however. Full of far more bodies, practically roiling with whispering and excitement.

He was reunited with citrus and pine. Warness tightened his grip when Elektra peeked behind her, then waved back at him. Stick told her to behave. Stick didn’t mean this command, so Elektra waved again, harder this time. It made Matt snicker which pissed the Commander right off.

“You will stand still,” he hissed. “And be _silent._ ”

He almost accepted the command, but then Elektra huffed in the deepest, squeakiest baritone she could muster ‘and be _silent_ ,’ and they were both giggling all over. The commander got huffy about that. He didn’t like to share Matt’s attention. He probably also didn’t like that Elektra made Matt smile when he’d been trying for days to get something marginally unhateful out of him.

“Stick, control your guide,” he snapped.

“Ellie, Matty, behave,” Stick said. That was an order, albeit a half-hearted one. And all it served to do was piss the Commander off even more when not only Elektra, but Matt followed it.

 

 

The recruits were abysmal. And not just because Clint was over there in the corner spawning disaster like frog eggs. Although that was pretty fucking entertaining in and of itself. No, the kids were just really, really underprepared. More than six different styles going on. No consistency whatsoever. Bunch of guys in a line trying to be super macho about it all and missing their marks by a long shot.

Stick’s heart beat like it did the time when Freddy, Matt’s dorm-mate at St. Agnes’s, had come over and yanked on his fingers to ask him if he knew Santa. Stick had told him that he and Santa had been in a feud for the last sixty years and this year, by god, he was gonna down the old man’s sleigh before it even got lift off.

That is to say, he was not impressed.

His annoyance must have shown on his face because Elektra kept making these little squeaks and then trying to breathe through them and it was making Matt have to work twice as hard to swallow his own, and like, girl, _stop_. Sensei’s gonna yell at both of us and we both know he’s gonna blame me first.

Matt thought the Commander was giving him a nasty look, his head was turned slightly his way. He schooled his face extra hard to try to contain himself.

Eventually, the assembly came to an end and everyone filed out, silent, brimming with the knowledge that that had been a test and they’d all spectacularly failed it. The Commander knew it. The whole high command knew it. And Stick sure as fuck knew it.

They waited until everyone was good and gone before forming a circle in the middle of the raised platform at the front of the auditorium. The Commander took a step forward and Matt saw his opportunity and took it.

It was a 2 second window. Before the foot came down, Matt pulled away from the guy’s arm and crossed the center of the circle to fall in at Stick’s side before the Commander could even process what was happening. Heartbeats leapt up in arches around the circle.

Warness’s roared.

Satisfaction rushed in Matt’s ears.

Warness wanted to cross over that line, to grab him, and wrangle him back from Stick’s side, but he didn’t dare. No one dared cross Stick. Stick knew this and gently held out an elbow to bump Matt a half-step back behind him to match Elektra on the other side. He stood up straight again and tucked the tips of his fingers into his pockets.

“That was illuminating,” he said evenly. Elektra snickered at the joke. Matt smiled at her and again, heartbeats surged in ripples around the circle.

“It would seem—” one of the officers started.

“I’m talking now,” Stick said. Silence reigned again.

“I’m hoping that you all realize what you’ve just shown me,” Stick said, “And frankly, I’m currently operating under the impression that such lack of competence in even the most basic movements is not worth the time, effort, or commitment you are requesting, _Commander_. This has been a disgrace to the Chaste. Myself and my students will be taking our leave.”

“No, we had a deal,” Warness said calmly. “Your service for your student, Stick. I’m afraid Matthew will be staying with us.”

Stick huffed.

“No, I don’t think so. It’d be a waste of his talent. Not to mention his _blood_ , Commander. It is my understanding that since he’s been in your so-called care, Matty’s gone so far as to try to drink cleaning fluid. Is that right, boy?”

Oh, he got to talk? That was new.

“Yes, sensei.”

“He did no such thing,” Warness maintained. Stick’s silence was skeptical.

“Matt only acts out when he’s not properly disciplined, _Commander_. You understand that this is also a reflection of your leadership capabilities, or lack thereof.”

“He has been disciplined,” the Commander snarled. “And he will be disciplined until I see fit to end it. Your word means nothing to me, Stick. We _are_ the Chaste, and your little _whore_ will do as he is told. That was our deal. So if you want to take your leave, fine. Have it. But the Chaste will remain and it will grow and your boy will be a part of that, whether he wants it or not.”

Stick’s pulse went from slow to fast to slow again. Elektra’s rabbited, vibrating in Matt’s ears.

He could feel his own throbbing in the side of his neck.

“Matthew’s not a whore, Warness. He’s a warrior—” Stick started, low and dangerous.

“A _whore_ , Stick. Both of them are. You walk around claiming that they’re your students, guides, whatever. But you’re no better than anyone here.”

“What exactly do you mean by that, Warness? Are you implying that I rape my students? Is that how you teach yours? Is that how your Chaste operates?”

“They are soldiers, they do what they’re told.”

They do what they’re told, huh?

Is that what they did?

With guns pointed at family members, heads full of false glory, hands unaware that they’d never survive real combat.

They do what they’re told. No, they do what you tell them.

“The Chaste does not collect canon fodder, Warness.” Stick snarled. “If you will not put time into your warriors, then I will not do it for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Matthew will not do it for you, either.”

“He will. He will obey now, too. Isn’t that right, Devil. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to Foggy, would you? Would you?”

 

 

Forgive me for my sins, Oh Lord. Forgive me, but this man has caused unto me pain and suffering over the last countless hours. This man has broken my bones and written his name in my blood. His avarice knows no bounds and he has desired my body without my consent and he has deceived these children and from many, he has stolen lives, in part and in whole. Oh Lord. I’m sorry.

But I must submit to the Devil.

 

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: brief suicide reference

The hike down the mountain was silent, which was surprising, given the absolute mayhem that they’d left the organization up the hill in.

No answer from Red or Stick or Elektra followed by hella gunshots in the auditorium meant that Wade and Co. had decided to invoke the ever unstoppable Plan B, which was pound on every door and scream that the whole place was under attack from the Hand.

Very exciting.

A huge fucking lie.

But still very exciting.

On the upside, in the chaos, it had been very, very easy to get out unnoticed. And somehow, it seemed that the Chaste-but-not-Chaste Trio had picked up on the plan and met them at the halfway point on the mountain, where they’d all originally split off from.

Red was in a state. Many states, probably. He was soaked in blood, but thankfully did not appear to have sustained any gunshot wounds. Still, he panted and shivered and flinched when Wade tried to touch him. Stick said simply to give him space and Wade was loathe to admit that the old man seemed to actually know what he was talking about but also intrigued because Stick had given his coat to his kid. Neither of them acknowledged this, even when Red gave it back at the bottom of the mountain after they’d gotten him new, non-blood-soaked clothes.

He huddled with Elektra. They nestled their heads together. Stick didn’t intervene.

No one said a word between them.

It was eerie.

 

 

It was only on the fun bus ride south, when Red had fallen asleep against Barton’s shoulder, that Elektra told them what had happened.

“Fuck,” Barton said quietly. “Did he kill him?”

“Sensei stopped him,” Elektra whispered. Sensei did not make any indication that he’d heard or cared about any of this.

“He said that sometimes death is a mercy too great for certain men to deserve.”

Sensei said nothing. Red said nothing. He still had blood under his fingernails, the ones that weren’t held together by tape and hope.

Jesus H. Christ.

Wade kind of wanted to go back and kill the guy.

“That’d be two of us then,” Elektra sang. Then she slid back down over the headrest to bother her teacher. She poked at him and asked if he wanted to listen to some pop with her. He finally broke his silence to tell her that if she asked again he’d start with the pinky toe.

 

 

Red acted like nothing happened in the weeks that followed. He hugged Peter and he laid all over Foggy and he apparently went to see his mama.

It was only after a night where things got too much for him out on his own that he slipped into Wade’s window without him noticing. He startled upon seeing the black suit on his kitchen countertop and demanded to know when the fuck he’d gotten there.

Or better yet, how the fuck he’d done that.

Red kicked his boots a little.

“There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you and Pete about,” he revealed quietly.

Oh.

“It’s alright, champ. Can’t live in the back of each other’s brains,” Wade told him.

“Thank you for coming to get me back there in the mountains. I didn’t thank you before, that was rude. Ungrateful.”

Where was this coming from?

“It’s fine,” Wade told him carefully setting his glass down on the kitchen island, “You were traumatized. Are traumatized.”

“If things were reversed, I’d do the same for you,” Red said, as though he needed to get it out. “And Frank. And Clint. I’d—I’m sorry I worried you.”

Alright, no. Something was up and they were just talking around it now. That wasn’t Wade’s style. It was only allowed when he did it, and anyways, he had a pretty good idea of what exactly it was. He sighed and stood up straight in the middle of the kitchen with his arms out.

“Bring it in,” he said. Red scoffed and dipped his head. Wade wiggled his fingers. “C’mon, I mean it.” Red shook his head. Wade tipped his own head up to stare at the ceiling and waited.

And waited.

Red scoffed again.

“Wade—”

“You gonna leave me standing here all night, pal, or what?”

He rolled his eyes and hopped off the counter and got into Wade’s space. Wade wrapped him up in another giant hug before he could have second thoughts. Red huffed and little and pressed his forehead down against Wade’s collarbone.

“You’re alright,” Wade told him. He pressed his head in harder. Wade rubbed a hand over his back and felt the sniff. “He was horrible to you, Matt.”

Another sniff. A bit of a shudder.

“He hurt you. They hurt you. They wanted to use you for their own gain. Threatened the people you loved. Sometimes, it is justified to want to kill someone. Trust me on this one. And anyways, you didn’t, so what’re you crying for, huh?”

Red shook his head against Wade’s shoulder. Wade sighed.

“Did you tell Nelson?”

Another shake.

“You should tell Nelson.”

“H-he’ll be-be so disappointed _._ ”

Oh, honey.

There wasn’t too much to say to that. It wasn’t Nelson who was or would be disappointed. That was just projection. They both already knew who was disappointed, and it wasn’t Wade.

“Matt, you’re more than a weapon.”

“Sensei s-said he’d train me again if-if I wanted it.” The stammer only came out when Red was really, genuinely upset. It was breaking Wade’s heart, the way Peter’s crying had.

“What did I just say? You got cotton in your ears? You’re not just a weapon, Red.”

“I’ve only ever been a weapon.”

“No, not even _I_ am only ever a weapon. Your psychotic sister, is she only a weapon?”

“Elektra’s d-different.”

This fucking guy.

“How is she different?” he asked.

“She’s different.”

“Come on, counselor, you’ve gotta have a better argument than that.”

A watery laugh. There, progress. Red sniffed again and wormed an arm up between them to wipe at his face.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry, just admit you’re talking shit.”

Red laughed again.

“Sorry,” he said instead.

Aigh. Professional help. This kid needed professional help. Wade didn’t have the time or ability to sit through that talk at the moment, though, so he pulled back and caught Red’s face between his hands and shook him back and forth a bit gently.

“Apologies are like asses,” he sang, then stopped. “Hey, I know what’s gonna make you feel better.”

“A bullet?” Red offered.

Oh, okay. One of those kinds of moods.

“Okay, one, not joking about suicide. And two, a cat.”

Red sniffed.

“I do like cats,” he admitted with a shrug.

“Well, then you’re in luck,” Wade told him with a finger, “Because I have both a cat _and_ antihistamines, which means that you might even be able to touch her.”

Red laughed and reached out to push Wade’s finger out his face.

“I’m not that allergic,” he said.

“You literally are.”

“Am not.”

“You’ve never seen your rash, man, it’s impressive.”

Wade blinked and found it really hard to breath all of the sudden. Red squeezed his chest like he was trying to force all the feelings he had in his own into Wade’s by osmosis. Of course, he couldn’t initiate affection like a normal person. Still though, the gesture was sweet. Wade managed to get his arms down enough to awkwardly hug back.

“You’re alright, buddy,” he gasped.

“Thank you.”

“Hey, I said—”

“Just shut up and take it, Wade. _Thank you._ ”

Well, alright. But only this once.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND we're done. 
> 
> Sorry to wrap this one up in such a hurry y'all. I just needed to finish the piece so I can move onto the next big one. 
> 
> Thanks everyone for taking this foray into some darker themes with me and thanks especially to everyone who's commented (y'all are lovely and excellent). More thanks so much to all the folks who have left kudos and the silent readers (I see y'all and I appreciate you.)


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